casion to leave the room at the conclusion of this
unflattering speech: and Beatrice indulged in a long laugh.

"Well, what I am afraid of," she said to Margaret and Doucebelle, "is
that Eva is rather wanting in the virtue of common-sense. But whether I
am to lay that on her education, I do not know."

There was no answer: but the thoughts of the hearers were almost
opposites. Margaret considered Beatrice rash and self-satisfied.
Doucebelle thought heartily with her, and only wished that she had as
much courage to say so.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

WHAT IS LOVE?

"She only said, `My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said:
She said, `I am aweary, weary,
I would that I were dead!'"

_Tennyson_.

It was fortunate for Bruno de Malpas that he had a friend in Bishop
Grosteste, whose large heart and clear brain were readily interested in
his wish to return from regular to secular orders. He smoothed the path
considerably, and promised him a benefice in his diocese if the
dispensation could be obtained. But the last was a lengthy process, and
some months passed away before the answer could be received from Rome.

It greatly scandalised Hawise and Eva--for different reasons--to see how
very little progress was made by Beatrice in that which in their eyes
was the Christian religion. It was a comfort to them to reflect that
she had been baptised as an infant, and therefore in the event of sudden
death had a chance of going to Heaven, instead of the dreadful certainty
of being shut up in Limbo,--a place of vague locality and vaguer
character, being neither pleasant nor painful, but inhabited by all the
hapless innocents whose heathen or careless Christian parents suffered
them to die unregenerated. But both of them were sorely shocked to
discover, when she had been about two months at Bury, that poor Beatrice
was still ignorant of the five commandments of the Church. Nor was this
all: she irreverently persisted in her old inquiry of "What is the
Church?" and sturdily demanded what right the Church had to give
commandments.

Hawise was quite distressed. It was not _proper_,--a phrase which, with
her, was the strongest denunciation that could be uttered. Nobody had
ever asked such questions before: _ergo_, they ought never to be asked.
Every sane person knew perfectly well what the Church was (though, when
gently urged by Beatrice, Hawise backed out of any definition), and no
good Catholic could possibly