h pain.

Pitt had procured from one of the canons, who had been his uncle's
friend, an order which permitted them to go their own way and take
their own time, unaccompanied and untrammelled by vergers. No showman
was necessary in Pitt's presence; he could tell them all, and much more
than they cared about knowing. Mrs. Dallas, indeed, cared for little
beyond the tokens of England's antiquity and glory; her interest was
mostly expended on the royal tombs and those connected with them. For
was not Pitt now, virtually, one of the favoured nation, by habit and
connection as well as in blood? and did not England's greatness send
down a reflected light on all her sons?--only poetical justice, as it
was earlier sons who had made the greatness. But of that Mrs. Dallas
did not think. 'England' was an abstract idea of majesty and power,
embodied in a land and a government; and Westminster Abbey was in a
sort the record and visible token of the same, and testimony of it, in
the face of all the world. So Mrs. Dallas enjoyed Westminster Abbey,
and her heart swelled in contemplation of its glories; but its real
glories she saw not. Lights and shadows, colouring, forms of beauty,
associations of tenderness, majesties of age, had all no existence for
her. The one feeling in exercise, which took its nourishment from all
she looked upon, was pride. But pride is a dull kind of gratification;
and the good lady's progress through the Abbey could not be called
satisfactory to one who knew the place.

Mr. Dallas was neither proud nor pleased. He was, however, an
Englishman, and Westminster Abbey was intensely English, and to go
through and look at it was the right thing to do; so he went; doing his
duty.

And beside these two went another bit of humanity, all alive and
quivering, intensely sensitive to every impression, which must needs be
more or less an impression of suffering. Her folly, she told herself,
it was which had so stripped her of her natural defences, and exposed
her to suffering. The one only comfort left was, that nobody knew it;
and nobody should know it. The practice of society had given her
command over herself, and she exerted it that day; all she had.

They were making the tour of St. Edmund's chapel.

'Look here, Betty,' cried Mrs. Dallas, who was still a little apart
from the others with her son,--'come here and see this! Look here--the
tomb of two little children of Edward III.!'

'After going over some of the o