udge the waste. There are so many
things more worthy of you that you might do."

"What, for example?"

"Anything almost," cried the other; "digging, ploughing,
building--anything! And for me too."

This he said in an undertone; but Reginald heard, and did not carry his
magnanimity so far as not to reply.

"Yes," he said; "if I am wasted reading prayers for my old men, what are
you, who come to agitate for my abolition? _I_ think, too, almost
anything would be better than to encourage the ignorant to make
themselves judges of public institutions, which the wisest even find too
delicate to meddle with. The digging and the ploughing might be a good
thing for more than me."

"I don't say otherwise," said the young Dissenter, following into the
old fifteenth-century chapel, small but perfect, the young priest of the
place. They stood together for a moment under the vaulted roof, both
young, in the glory of their days, both with vague noble meanings in
them, which they knew so poorly how to carry out. They meant everything
that was fine and great, these two young men, standing upon the
threshold of their life, knowing little more than that they were
fiercely opposed to each other, and meant to reform the world each in
his own way; one by careful services and visitings of the poor, the
other by the Liberation Society and overthrow of the State Church; both
foolish, wrong and right, to the utmost bounds of human possibility. How
different they felt themselves standing there, and yet how much at one
they were without knowing it! Northcote had sufficient knowledge to
admire the perfect old building. He followed his guide with a certain
humility through the details, which Reginald had already learned by
heart.

"There is nothing so perfect, so beautiful, so real now-a-days," said
the young Churchman, with a natural expansion of mind over the beauty to
which he had fallen heir. It seemed to him, as he looked up at the tall
windows with their graceful tracery, that he was the representative of
all who had worked out their belief in God within these beautiful walls,
and of all the perpetual worshippers who had knelt among the old brasses
of the early founders upon the worn floor. The other stood beside him
with a half envy in his mind. The Dissenter did not feel himself the
heir of those centuries in the same unhesitating way. He tried to feel
that he was the heir of something better and more spiritual, yet felt a
not ungener