nse;--no, not that, but a higher and finer attribute, for which I find
no better word. However tremulously you might vibrate, this quality,
I supposed, would always bring you back to the equipoise. You were a
creature of imagination, and yet as truly a New England girl as any with
whom you grew up in your native village. If there were one person in
the world whose native rectitude of thought, and something deeper, more
reliable, than thought, I would have trusted against all the arts of a
priesthood,--whose taste alone, so exquisite and sincere that it rose
to be a moral virtue, I would have rested upon as a sufficient
safeguard,--it was yourself!"

"I am conscious of no such high and delicate qualities as you allow me,"
answered Hilda. "But what have I done that a girl of New England birth
and culture, with the right sense that her mother taught her, and the
conscience that she developed in her, should not do?"

"Hilda, I saw you at the confessional!" said Kenyon.

"Ah well, my dear friend," replied Hilda, casting down her eyes, and
looking somewhat confused, yet not ashamed, "you must try to forgive me
for that,--if you deem it wrong, because it has saved my reason, and
made me very happy. Had you been here yesterday, I would have confessed
to you."

"Would to Heaven I had!" ejaculated Kenyon.

"I think," Hilda resumed, "I shall never go to the confessional again;
for there can scarcely come such a sore trial twice in my life. If I had
been a wiser girl, a stronger, and a more sensible, very likely I might
not have gone to the confessional at all. It was the sin of others that
drove me thither; not my own, though it almost seemed so. Being what
I am, I must either have done what you saw me doing, or have gone mad.
Would that have been better?"

"Then you are not a Catholic?" asked the sculptor earnestly.

"Really, I do not quite know what I am," replied Hilda, encountering his
eyes with a frank and simple gaze. "I have a great deal of faith, and
Catholicism seems to have a great deal of good. Why should not I be a
Catholic, if I find there what I need, and what I cannot find elsewhere?
The more I see of this worship, the more I wonder at the exuberance with
which it adapts itself to all the demands of human infirmity. If its
ministers were but a little more than human, above all error, pure from
all iniquity, what a religion would it be!"

"I need not fear your conversion to the Catholic faith," remarked
Keny