me! What
can he see in me? And how can it be that a great lord, who speaks so
gently and is so reverential to a poor girl, and asks prayers so humbly,
can be so wicked and unbelieving as he says he is? Dear God, it cannot
be that he is an unbeliever; the great Enemy has been permitted to try
him, to suggest doubts to him, as he has to holy saints before now. How
beautifully he spoke about his mother!--tears glittered in his eyes
then,--ah, there must be grace there after all!"

"Well, my little heart," said Elsie, interrupting her reveries, "have
you had a pleasant day?"

"Delightful, grandmamma," said Agnes, blushing deeply with
consciousness.

"Well," said Elsie, with satisfaction, "one thing I know,--I've
frightened off that old hawk of a cavalier with his hooked nose. I
haven't seen so much as the tip of his shoe-tie to-day. Yesterday he
made himself very busy around our stall; but I made him understand that
you never would come there again till the coast was clear."

The monk was busily retouching the sketch of the Virgin of the
Annunciation. He looked up, and saw Agnes standing gazing towards the
setting sun, the pale olive of her cheek deepening into a crimson
flush. His head was too full of his own work to give much heed to the
conversation that had passed, but, looking at the glowing face, he said
to himself,--

"Truly, sometimes she might pass for the rose of Sharon as well as the
lily of the valley!"

The moon that evening rose an hour later than the night before, yet
found Agnes still on her knees before the sacred shrine, while Elsie,
tired, grumbled at the draft on her sleeping-time.

"Enough is as good as a feast," she remarked between her teeth; still
she had, after all, too much secret reverence for her grandchild's piety
openly to interrupt her. But in those days, as now, there were the
material and the spiritual, the souls who looked only on things that
could be seen, touched, and tasted, and souls who looked on the things
that were invisible.

Agnes was pouring out her soul in that kind of yearning, passionate
prayer possible to intensely sympathetic people, in which the
interests and wants of another seem to annihilate for a time personal
consciousness, and make the whole of one's being seem to dissolve in an
intense solicitude for something beyond one's self. In such hours prayer
ceases to be an act of the will, and resembles more some overpowering
influence which floods the soul from w