not for his also? He
is not specially my friend, but I wish well to all men. He is not at
home at present, but I understood that he will be here shortly."

"Do you always go to church?" he asked, grounding his question not
on any impertinent curiosity as to her observance of her religious
duties, but because he had thought from her dress she must certainly
be a Quaker.

"I do usually go to your church on a Sunday."

"Nay," said he, "I have no right to claim it as my church. I fear you
must regard me also as a heathen,--as you do George Roden."

"I am sorry for that, sir. It cannot be good that any man should be
a heathen when so much Christian teaching is abroad. But men I think
allow themselves a freedom of thought from which women in their
timidity are apt to shrink. If so it is surely good that we should be
cowards?" Then the door opened, and Mrs. Roden came into the room.

"George is gone," she said, "to call on a sick friend, but he will be
back immediately. He got your letter yesterday evening, and he left
word that I was to tell you that he would be back by eleven. Have you
introduced yourself to my friend Miss Fay?"

"I had not heard her name," he said smiling, "but we had introduced
ourselves."

"Marion Fay is my name," said the girl, "and yours, I suppose
is--Lord Hampstead."

"So now we may be supposed to know each other for ever after," he
replied, laughing; "--only I fear, Mrs. Roden, that your friend will
repudiate the acquaintance because I do not go to church."

"I said not so, Lord Hampstead. The nearer we were to being
friends,--if that were possible,--the more I should regret it." Then
the two ladies started on their morning duty.

Lord Hampstead when he was alone immediately decided that he would
like to have Marion Fay for a friend, and not the less so because
she went to church. He felt that she had been right in saying that
audacity in speculation on religious subjects was not becoming a
young woman. As it was unfitting that his sister Lady Frances should
marry a Post Office clerk, so would it have been unbecoming that
Marion Fay should have been what she herself called a heathen. Surely
of all the women on whom his eyes had ever rested she was,--he would
not say to himself the most lovely,--but certainly the best worth
looking at. The close brown bonnet and the little cap, and the
well-made brown silk dress, and the brown gloves on her little hands,
together made, to his eyes, as pl