Fragments from Augustina's talk at Folkestone came back to her. Once she had overheard some half-whispered conversation between her stepmother and a Catholic friend, from which she had vaguely understood that the "Blessed Sacrament" was kept in the Catholic churches, was always there, and that the faithful "visited" it--that these "visits" were indeed specially recommended as a means to holiness. And she recalled how, as they came home from their daily walk to the beach, Mrs. Fountain would disappear from her, through the shadowy door of a Catholic church that stood in the same street as their lodgings--how she would come home half an hour afterwards, shaken with fresh ardours, fresh remorse. But how could such a thing be allowed, be possible, in a private chapel--in a room that was really part of a private house? GOD--the Christ of Calvary--in that gilt box, upon that altar! The young girl's arms fell by her side in a sudden rigidity. A wave of the most passionate repulsion swept through her. What a gross, what an intolerable superstition!--how was she to live with it, beside it? The next instant it was as though her hand clasped her father's--clinging to him proudly, against this alien world. Why should she feel lonely?--the little heretic, left standing there alone in her distant corner. Let her rather rejoice that she was her father's daughter! She drew herself up, and coolly looked about her. The worshippers had risen; long as the time had seemed to Laura, they had only been two or three minutes on their knees; and she could see that Augustina was talking eagerly to her brother, pointing now to the walls, now to the altar. It seemed as though Augustina were no less astonished than her stepdaughter by the magnificence of the chapel. Was it all new,--the frescoes, the altar with its marble and its gold, the white figure of the Virgin, which gleamed above the small side-altar to the left? It had the air of newness and of costliness, an air which struck the eye all the more sharply because of the contrast between it and the penury, the starvation, of the great house that held the chapel in its breast.