pation,' she said gently, 'than nature, the
first day of returning to the open air after so frightful and
dangerous an accident? Were there no thanks due to One above?'

Lancelot understood her.

'How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness?'

'What! with a cigar and a fishing-rod?'

'Certainly. Why not?'

Argemone really could not tell at the moment. The answer upset her
scheme entirely.

'Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of
worship?' continued our hero. 'How can we better glorify the worker
than by delighting in his work?'

'Ah!' sighed the lady, 'why trust to these self-willed methods, and
neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared
for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?'

'EVERY feeling, Miss Lavington?'

Argemone hesitated. She had made the good old stock assertion, as
in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were
several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which
seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.

'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, 'is only the heaven and the
earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the
sense to be silent, and "hear my mother sing;" my priests and
preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not
well enough furnished? Do you want to reduce my circular infinite
chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one? My sphere harmonies to the
Gregorian tones in four parts? My world-wide priesthood, with their
endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a
white sheet? And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the
blue-bells ringing God's praises, as they do in "The story without
an End," for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with
their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which
they neither feel nor understand a word?'

Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast.
Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while
as if there was solemn earnest under the surface.

'Oh, Mr. Smith!' she said, 'how can you dare talk so of a liturgy
compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages! You
revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!'

'There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love
it.'

'Oh,' she said hopefully, 'that you would but try the Chu