sentences, lending his eloquence all
she felt: he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the
devotional service she was holding mutely. Mademoiselle upon St. Louis:
'Worthy to be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts,
where the thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the
mother emotions. Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and
deeply moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open
to be musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales. This crypt of
the recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
altar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death. With such
a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation
to political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of
things with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable,
obliterate the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and
garden were, would be appeased, transfigured. She hoped, she prayed for
that glorious leader's advent.

On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young
creature saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams
of a body rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her
hopes and prayers were dumb in her bosom. It signified shame. She knew
not the how, for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment
of earth and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.
But if the new crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born
prince nobly man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet
from the face of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet
upon the ground. Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the
inmost forest-well of mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of
good aspiration through their obscurities find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and
the old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be
friendly! What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoi