owards the open down above.

But Lancelot's sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just
outside the churchyard. Another moment--they had leaped the rails;
and there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling,
like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles
of the quiet dead.

Lancelot shuddered--the thing was not wrong--'it was no one's
fault,'--but there was a ghastly discord in it. Peace and strife,
time and eternity--the mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal
spirit,--the frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible
earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within
him. He pulled his horse up violently, and stood as if rooted to
the place, gazing at he knew not what.

The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of
joy--and then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and
breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at
every stride. The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of
rolling flints died away above. Lancelot looked up, startled at the
silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his
pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the
graves.

On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet
loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning
round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as
completely as Lancelot himself.

That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them,
entered his heart at once, never again to leave it. Her features
were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes
shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble
cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward
round the towering neck. With her perfect masque and queenly
figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model
from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine--the ideal
of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by
girlish devotion. She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a
glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well
as by the will of God.

They gazed one moment more at each other--but what is time to
spirits? With them, as with their Father, 'one day is as a thousand
years.' But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the
decided interferenc