gravely into his eyes, "seems the
height of absurdity to you?"

"Why should it seem the height of absurdity to me?" he asked.

"You are a Protestant, I suppose?"

"I suppose so. But what of that? At all events, I believe there are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the usual
philosophies. And I see no reason why it should not have been the
Blessed Virgin who sent us across their path."

"What would your Protestant pastors and masters do, if they heard you?
Isn't that what they call Popish superstition?"

"I daresay. But I'm not sure that there's any such thing as
superstition. Superstition, in its essence, is merely a recognition of
the truth that in a universe of mysteries and contradictions, like ours,
nothing conceivable or inconceivable is impossible."

"Oh, no, no," she objected. "Superstition is the belief in something
that is ugly and bad and unmeaning. That is the difference between
superstition and religion. Religion is the belief in something that is
beautiful and good and significant--something that throws light into the
dark places of life--that helps us to see and to live."

"Yes," said Peter, "I admit the distinction." After a little suspension,
"I thought," he questioned, "that all Catholics were required to go to
Mass on Sunday?"

"Of course--so they are," said she.

"But--but you--" he began.

"I hear Mass not on Sunday only--I hear it every morning of my life."

"Oh? Indeed? I beg your pardon," he stumbled. "I--one--one never sees
you at the village church."

"No. We have a chapel and a chaplain at the castle."

She mounted her bicycle.

"Good-bye," she said, and lightly rode away.

"So-ho! Her bigotry is not such a negligible quantity, after all," Peter
concluded.

"But what," he demanded of Marietta, as she ministered to his wants
at dinner, "what does one barrier more or less matter, when people are
already divided by a gulf that never can be traversed? You see that
river?" He pointed through his open window to the Aco. "It is a symbol.
She stands on one side of it, I stand on the other, and we exchange
little jokes. But the river is always there, flowing between us,
separating us. She is the daughter of a lord, and the widow of a duke,
and the fairest of her sex, and a millionaire, and a Roman Catholic.
What am I? Oh, I don't deny I 'm clever. But for the rest? ... My
dear Marietta, I am simply, in one word, the victim of a misplaced
attachment."

"Non cap