Then in endless course the intellectual side of it all began to present itself. She had assisted at what the Government called a crime; it was for that--that collection of strange but surely at least innocent things--actions, words, material objects--that men and women of the same flesh and blood as herself were ready to die; and for which others equally of one nature with herself were ready to put them to death. It was the mass--the mass--she had seen--she repeated the word to herself, so sinister, so suggestive, so mighty. Then she began to think again--if indeed it is possible to say that she had ever ceased to think of him--of Anthony, who would be so much horrified if he knew; of Hubert, who had renounced this wonderful worship, and all, she feared, for love of her--and above all of her father, who had regarded it with such repugnance:--yes, thought Isabel, but he knows all now. Then she thought of Mistress Margaret again. After all, the nun had a spiritual life which in intensity and purity surpassed any she had ever experienced or even imagined; and yet the heart of it all was the mass. She thought of the old wrinkled quiet face when she came back to breakfast at the Dower House: she had soon learnt to read from that face whether mass had been said that morning or not at the Hall. And Mistress Margaret was only one of thousands to whom this little set of actions half seen and words half heard, wrought and said by a man in a curious dress, were more precious than all meditation and prayer put together. Could the vast superstructure of prayer and effort and aspiration rest upon a piece of empty folly such as children or savages might invent? Then very naturally, as she began now to get quieter and less excited, she passed on to the spiritual side of it.