"Are you a Christian?" The question came so suddenly, that it sounded like a mild rebuke--but no, it was not meant so. The maiden turned towards me at a little wicket-gate, and her face expressed some doubt about letting me come in. "Yes, I am a Christian," I answered pretty firmly, and then began to trim a little--"not a very hot one I should say. Not at all bigoted, I mean; not one of those who think that every other person is a heathen." I had made a mull of it. For the first time I beheld a smile of some contempt upon the gentle face. And I resolved to be of the strictest Orthodoxy evermore. Feeble religious views did not suit her. "Christian! I should think so," I proceeded with high courage. "There is scarcely a church-tower for ten miles round, that has not been built by my ancestors." Possibly this assertion needed not only a grain but a block of salt. But Dariel was of good strong faith, without which a woman deserves only to be a man. She opened the gate, and let me in, so beautifully that I was quite afraid. "You must not be frightened," she said, with a very fine rally of herself, to encourage mine, "it is the House of the Lord, and you have come into it with your hat on. But you did not know, because there is no roof." No roof, and no walls, and no anything left, except the sweet presence of this young maid. I took off my hat, and tried to think of the Creed, and the Catechism, and my many pious ancestors, if there had been any. And I almost tumbled over a great pile of ruin stones. "We will not go in there, because--because we are not thinking of it properly," she pointed, as she spoke, to an inner circle of ruins, with some very fine blackberries just showing colour; and suddenly I knew it as the sanctuary, in which I had first descried her kneeling figure. "But here we may sit down, without--without--it is a long word, Mr. Cran-lee, I cannot quite recall it." "Desecration," I suggested, and she looked at me with doubt, as if the word had made the thing. "But you do not think it will be that, if I speak of my dear father here?" I was very near telling her that we think nothing of such old monkish ruins, except to eat our chicken-pie, and drink our bottled beer in their most holy places; but why should I shock her feelings so? Little knows the ordinary English girl, that when she displays her want of reverence for the things above her, she is doing all she can to kill that feeling towards herself, which is one of her choicest gifts. "Dariel, you may be quite sure of this," I replied, after taking my seat upon a stone, over against the one she had chosen, but lower, so that I could look up at her; "a place of holy memories like this is the very spot especially fitted for--for consideration of your dear father. Some of my ancestors no doubt were the founders of this ancient chapel, so that I speak with some authority, upon a point of that sort."