ure he was making out; but his old
hearty warmth declared itself by degrees; and his admiration and his
tenderness gave such warm color to his language as it might have shown
if her little gloved hand had been shivering even then in his own
passionate clasp. And as he closed, with a great glow upon his face,
Madam Maverick burst forth,--

"_Mon Dieu_, how I love her! Yet is it not a thing astonishing that I
should ask you, a stranger, Monsieur, how my own child is looking?
_Culpa mea! culpa mea!_" and she clutched at her rosary, and mumbled an
ave, with her eyes lifted and streaming tears.

Reuben looked upon her in wonder, amazed at the depth of her emotion.
Could this be all hypocrisy?

"_Tenez!_" said she, recovering herself, and reading, as it were, his
doubts. "You count these" (lifting her rosary) "bawbles yonder, and our
prayers pagan prayers; my husband has told me, and that she, Adele, is
taught thus, and that the _Bon Dieu_ has forsaken our Holy Church,--that
He comes near now only to your--what shall I call them?--meeting-houses?
Tell me, Monsieur, does Adele think this?"

"I think," said Reuben, "that your daughter would have charity for any
religious faith which was earnest."

"Charity! _Mon Dieu!_ Charity for sins, charity for failings,--yes, I
ask it; but for my faith! No, Monsieur, no--no--a thousand times, no!"

"This is real," thought Reuben.

"Tell me, Monsieur," continued she, with a heat of language that excited
his admiration, "what is it you believe there? What is the horror
against which your New England teachers would warn my poor Adele? May
the Blessed Virgin be near her!"

Whereupon, Reuben undertook to lay down the grounds of distrust in which
he had been educated; not, surely, with the fervor or the logical
sequence which the old Doctor would have given to the same, but yet
inveighing in good set terms against the vain ceremonials, the
idolatries, the mummeries, the confessional, the empty absolution; and
summing up all with the formula (may be he had heard the Doctor use the
same language) that the piety of the Romanist was not so much a deep
religious conviction of the truth, as a sentiment.

"Sentiment!" exclaims Madam Maverick. "What else? What but love of the
good God?"

But not so much by her talk as by the every-day sight of her serene,
unfaltering devotion is Reuben won into a deep respect for her faith.

Those are rare days and rare nights for him, as the good ship Mete