others like them, that had been the scene of her romance with God, her
aspirations, tendernesses, tears and joys. She had walked in the tiny
cloister with her Lover in her heart, and the glazed laurel-leaves that
rattled in the garth had been musical with His voice; it was in her
little white cell that she had learned to sleep in His arms and to wake
to the brightness of His Face. And now all this was dissipated. There
were other associations with her home, of childish sorrows and passions
before she had known God, of hunting-parties and genial ruddy men who
smelt of fur and blood, of her mother's chilly steady presence--
associations that jarred with the inner life; whereas in the convent
there had been nothing that was not redolent with efforts and rewards of
the soul. Even without her mother life would have been hard enough now
at Overfield; with her it was nearly intolerable.

Chris, however, was able to do a good deal for the girl; for he had
suffered in the same way; and had the advantage of a man's strength. She
could talk to him as to no one else of the knowledge of the interior
vocation in both of them that persevered in spite of their ejection from
the cloister; and he was able to remind her that the essence of the
enclosure, under these circumstances, lay in the spirit and not in
material stones.

It was an advantage for Chris too to have her under his protection. The
fact that he had to teach her and remind her of facts that they both
knew, made them more real to himself; and to him as to her there came
gradually a kind of sorrow-shot contentment that deepened month by month
in spite of their strange and distracting surroundings.

But he was not wholly happy about her; she was silent and lonely
sometimes; he began to see what an immense advantage it would be to her
in the peculiarly difficult circumstances of the time, to have some one
of her own sex and sympathies at hand. But he did not see how it could
be arranged. For the present it was impossible for her to enter the
Religious Life, except by going abroad; and so long as there was the
faintest hope of the convents being restored in England, both she and
her father and brother shrank from the step. And the hope was increased
by the issue of the Six Articles in the following May, by which
Transubstantiation was declared to be a revealed dogma, to be held on
penalty of death by burning; and communion in one kind, the celibacy of
the clergy, the perpetui