"Celia, if you do not take care, I shall wash my hands of you. I will not be braved in this manner by a mere girl--a girl whose character is wholly unformed, and whose breeding is infinitely below her quality. Go to your chamber, and remain there until you are sufficiently humbled to request my pardon for treating me with so little respect." "Madam," was the soft answer, "if I have shown you any disrespect, I will ask your pardon now. It was not my wish to do so." Ah! the thing which Celia had shown Claude Ingram, and at which she could not bear to look, was her own heart. "Will you then retract what you have said?" "If I have said anything personally offensive to your Ladyship, I will retract it and ask your forgiveness. What I have said of my own relation to God I never can retract, Madam, for it is real and eternal." Lady Ingram was silent for a moment. Then she said, in her hardest voice and coldest manner, "Go to your chamber." Celia, courtesying to her step-mother, retired without another word. Left alone in her own boudoir, again that cloud of dread darkness rolled over Claude Ingram. The presence of the accusing angel was withdrawn, but the accusations rankled yet. She sat for some time in silence, and at length rose with a sudden shiver and a heavy sigh. Opening with a little silver key a private closet, richly ornamented, a shrine was disclosed, where a silver lamp burned before an image of the Virgin. Here Lady Ingram knelt, and made an "Act of Contrition" and an "Act of Faith."[9] The repetition of vain words put no more contrition nor faith into her heart than before she uttered them. Only the soul was lulled to sleep: and she rose satisfied with herself and her interview. "Do you think I did wrong, Patient?" asked Celia, sadly, of her sole _confidante_, at the moment when, at the other end of the house, Lady Ingram was finishing her devotions. Patient replied in a measured and constrained voice, "'He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.'"[10] "Yes, I know; but I am so very anxious not to be wanting in respect to her--not to put any obstacles in her way." "The more obstacles in her way the better, Madam; for it is the broad road that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat."[11] Celia sighed heavily, but made no answer. "Ah, poor blind soul!" continued Patient. "If only we would look more at all men and women in one light, and measure them by one test--friends of Christ, or enemies of Christ--I think we would behave different from that we do." Patient stitched away without saying more, and Celia sat looking thoughtfully out of the open window. From some cause unknown to herself, there suddenly rose before her a vision of the great laurel at Ashcliffe, and the stranger blessing her in the name of the Virgin. She exclaimed, "Patient!" in a tone which would have startled any one less unimpressionable than the placid woman who sat opposite her.