ssion; and
this religious sympathy was impassioned by the memory of an interview a
few years ago, when he had kissed that gracious white hand, and looked
into those alluring eyes, and, kneeling, stammered out in broken French
his loyalty and his hopes. Whether it was by her devilish craft as her
enemies said, or her serene and limpid innocence as her friends said, or
by a maddening compound of the two, as later students have said--at least
she had made the heart and confidence of old Sir Nicholas her own.

But there were troubles more practical than these mental struggles; it
was a misery, beyond describing, to this old man and his wife to see the
church, where once they had worshipped and received the sacraments, given
over to what was, in their opinion, a novel heresy, and the charge of a
schismatic minister. There, in the Maxwell chapel within, lay the bones
of their Catholic ancestors; and there they had knelt to adore and
receive their Saviour; and now for them all was gone, and the light was
gone out in the temple of the Lord. In the days of the previous Rector
matters were not so desperate; it had been their custom to receive from
his hands at the altar-rail of the Church hosts previously consecrated at
the Rectory; for the incumbent had been an old Marian priest who had not
scrupled so to relieve his Catholic sheep of the burden of recusancy,
while he fed his Protestant charges with bread and wine from the
Communion table. But now all that was past, and the entire family was
compelled year by year to slip off into Hampshire shortly before Easter
for their annual duties, and the parish church that their forefathers had
built, endowed and decorated, knew them no more.

But the present Rector, the Reverend George Dent, was far from a bigot;
and the Papists were more fortunate than perhaps, in their bitterness,
they recognised; for the minister was one of the rising Anglican school,
then strange and unfamiliar, but which has now established itself as the
main representative section of the Church of England. He welcomed the
effect but not the rise of the Reformation, and rejoiced that the
incrustations of error had been removed from the lantern of the faith.
But he no less sincerely deplored the fanaticism of the Puritan and
Genevan faction. He exulted to see England with a church truly her own at
last, adapted to her character, and freed from the avarice and tyranny of
a foreign despot who had assumed prerogatives t