Lady Lamerton, looking through the telescopes of magazine articles and reviews, was continually seeing deeper into the great luminous, heat-giving orb of Christianity; was shown behind its photosphere, taught to despise its chromosphere, and saw exhibited behind them blackness, exhausted force, the ash of extinct superstitions. The critical spectroscope was, moreover, brought to bear on Christianity, and to analyse its luminous atmosphere, and resolve it into alien matter, none distinctively solar, all vulgar, terrestrial, and fusible. The astronomer assures us that the fuel of the sun must fail, and then the world will congeal and life disappear out of it, and the critic announces the speedy expiring of Christianity. But, as—indifferent to the fact that the sun like a worn-out and made-up old beau is tottering to extinction—Lady Lamerton ordered summer bonnets, and laid out new azalea beds, just so was it with her religion. She continued to teach in Sunday-school, went to church regularly, read the Bible to sick people, did her duty in society, ordered her household, made home very dear to his lordship—in a word, lived in the light and heat of that same Christianity which she was assured, and by fits and starts believed, was an exploded superstition. As Lord Lamerton brought little Giles in his arms into the drawing-room, he whispered in his ear, “Not a word about the coach to mamma,” and Giles nodded. Lady Lamerton put her book aside and looked up. “Oh, Lamerton! What are you doing? The boy is unwell, and ought to be in bed.” “He has been dreaming, my dear; has had the nightmare, and I have brought him down for change, to drive the frightening thoughts away. He will not take cold, he is in flannel, and the shawl is round him. Besides, the evening is warm.” “He must not be here many minutes. He ought to be asleep,” said his mother. “My dear, I have promised him a look at a picture-book. It will make him forget his fancies. What have you over there?” “No Sunday stories or pictures, I fear.” “Yonder is a book in red—illustrated. What is it?” “‘Sintram’—it is not a Sunday book.” “I have not read it for an age, but if I remember right, the D—— comes into it.” “If that be the case it is perhaps allowable.” “What is the meaning of that picture?” asked the little boy, pointing to the first in the text. It was by Selous. It represented a great hall with a stone table in the centre, about which knights were seated, carousing. In the foreground was a boy kneeling, beating his head, apparently frantic. An old priest stood by, on one side, and a baron was starting from the table, and upsetting his goblet of wine. “I cannot tell, I forget the story, it must be forty years since I read it. I have not my glasses. Pass the book to your mother, she will read.”