you did not explain why we
should be so much more interested in this tomb of Edward the Third's
children than in that of any farmer's family?'

'My dear,' said Mrs. Dallas, 'I am astonished to hear you speak so. Are
not _you_ interested?'

'Yes ma'am; but why should I be? For really, often the farmer's family
is the more respectable of the two.'

'Are you such a republican, Betty? I did not know it.'

'There is a reason, though,' said Pitt, repressing a smile, 'which even
a republican may allow. The contrast here is greater. The glory and
pomp of earthly power is here brought into sharp contact with the
nothingness of it, So much yesterday,--so little to-day. Those uplifted
hands in prayer are exceedingly touching, when one remembers that all
their mightiness has come down to that!'

'It is not every fool that thinks so,' remarked Mr. Dallas ambiguously.

'No,' said Betty, with a sudden impulse of championship; 'fools do not
think at all.'

'Here is a tablet to Lady Knollys,' said Pitt, moving on. 'She was a
niece of Anne Boleyn, and waited upon her to the scaffold.'

'But that is only a tablet,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'Who is this, Pitt?' She
was standing before an effigy that bore a coronet; Betty beside her.

'That is the Duchess of Suffolk; the mother of Lady Jane Grey.'

'I see,' said Betty, 'that the Abbey is the complement of the Tower.
Her daughter and her husband lie there, under the pavement of the
chapel. How comes she to be here?'

'Her funeral was after Elizabeth came to the throne. But she had been
in miserable circumstances, poor woman, before that.'

'I wonder she lived at all,' said Betty, 'after losing husband and
daughter in that fashion! But people do bear a great deal and live
through it!'

Which words had an application quite private to the speaker, and which
no one suspected. And while the party were studying the details of the
tomb of John of Eltham, Pitt explaining and the others trying to take
it in, Betty stood by with passionate thoughts. '_They_ do not care,'
she said to herself; 'but he will bring some one else here, some day,
who will care; and they will come and come to the Abbey, and delight
themselves in its glories, and in each other, alternately. What do I
here? and what is the English Abbey to me?'

She showed no want of interest, however, and no wandering of thought;
on the contrary, an intelligent, thoughtful, gracious attention to
everything she saw and everything she