ether?'

Stephen's voice altered slightly as he replied 'That's Lady Elfride
Kingsmore--born Luxellian, and that is Arthur, her husband. I have heard
my father say that they--he--ran away with her, and married her against
the wish of her parents.'

'Then I imagine this to be where you got your Christian name, Miss
Swancourt?' said Knight, turning to her. 'I think you told me it was
three or four generations ago that your family branched off from the
Luxellians?'

'She was my grandmother,' said Elfride, vainly endeavouring to moisten
her dry lips before she spoke. Elfride had then the conscience-stricken
look of Guido's Magdalen, rendered upon a more childlike form. She kept
her face partially away from Knight and Stephen, and set her eyes upon
the sky visible outside, as if her salvation depended upon quickly
reaching it. Her left hand rested lightly within Knight's arm, half
withdrawn, from a sense of shame at claiming him before her old lover,
yet unwilling to renounce him; so that her glove merely touched
his sleeve. '"Can one be pardoned, and retain the offence?"' quoted
Elfride's heart then.

Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in
the shape of disjointed remarks. 'One's mind gets thronged with thoughts
while standing so solemnly here,' Knight said, in a measured quiet
voice. 'How much has been said on death from time to time! how much we
ourselves can think upon it! We may fancy each of these who lie here
saying:

'For Thou, to make my fall more great,
Didst lift me up on high.'

What comes next, Elfride? It is the Hundred-and-second Psalm I am
thinking of.'

'Yes, I know it,' she murmured, and went on in a still lower voice,
seemingly afraid for any words from the emotional side of her nature to
reach Stephen:

'"My days, just hastening to their end,
Are like an evening shade;
My beauty doth, like wither'd grass,
With waning lustre fade."'

'Well,' said Knight musingly, 'let us leave them. Such occasions as
these seem to compel us to roam outside ourselves, far away from the
fragile frame we live in, and to expand till our perception grows so
vast that our physical reality bears no sort of proportion to it. We
look back upon the weak and minute stem on which this luxuriant
growth depends, and ask, Can it be possible that such a capacity has a
foundation so small? Must I again return to my daily walk in that narrow
cell, a huma