‘I ought to be changed,’ said Agnes, with a pang in her heart. Alas, how little changed she was! how the sharp little bell wore her nerves out, and the rustle of the children preparing for chapel, and the clanging of all the doors! She went with Roger to the gate, which had to be unlocked, to his suppressed derision. ‘Have you to be locked in?’ the irreverent youth said. ‘Do they think you would all run away if you had the chance?’ Agnes took no notice of this unkind question. She herself, when she first arrived, had been a little appalled by the big mediæval key, emblem, apparently, of a very tremendous separation from the world; and she would not acknowledge that it meant no more than any innocent latch. When Roger was gone she had to hasten upstairs to get her poke-bonnet, and rush down again to take her place among her orphans for the evening service in the chapel, which the House took pleasure in calling Evensong. She knelt down among the rustling, restless children, while the cracked bell jangled, and a funny little procession of priests and choristers came from the vestry door. They were all the most excellent people in the world, and worthy of reverence in their way; but no procession of theatrical _supers_ was ever more quaintly comic than that which solemnly marched half-way round the homely little chapel of the House, chanting a hymn very much out of tune, and ending in the best of curates--a good man, worthy of any crowning, civic or sacred, who loved the poor, and whom the poor loved, but who loved the ceremonial of these comic-solemn processions almost more than the poor. With a simple, complaisant sense of what he was doing for the Church, this good man paced slowly past the kneeling figure of the young teacher, motionless in her black drapery, with her head bent down upon her hands. No mediæval Pope in full certainty of conducting the most impressive ceremonial in the world could have been more sincerely convinced of the solemnising effect of his progress, or more simply impressed by its spiritual grandeur; and no mediæval nun, in passionate penitence over a broken vow, could have been more utterly bowed down and prostrate than poor Agnes Burchell, guilty of having been beguiled by the pleasant voice and pleasant looks of Oswald Meredith into the dawn of innocent interest in that mundane person: she, who had so short time since offered herself to God’s service--she, who had made up her mind that to live an ideal life of high duty and self-sacrifice was better than the poor thing which vulgar minds called happiness. The cracked bell tinkled, and the rude choristers chanted, and all the restless children rustled about her, distracting her nerves and her attention. All this outside of devotion, she said to herself, and a heart distracted with vulgar vanities within! Was this the ideal to which she had vowed herself--the dream of a higher life? The children pulled at her black