“Hush!” he said, sitting down beside her once more, and his quietness of manner and restrained force dominated her. “Now I am resolved that you shall hear precisely what passed, for it is due to Mistress Neal as well as to you and to myself.” Very briefly he told of Norton’s interview with Major Locke at Gloucester, of the interrupted duel, of the way in which he and Joscelyn Heyworth had rescued Helena from the cruel trap that had been set for her. In spite of herself Hilary’s sympathies were enlisted on the side of the poor little maid, and perhaps she inclined to her all the more when she heard that she was now happily married to Mr. Humphrey Neal. “And her father?” she inquired. “What has become of him?” “He died at Marlborough, mainly, I do believe, because Colonel Norton forced him to travel when he was desperately wounded and refused him the aid of a surgeon,” said Gabriel. There was a silence. He would not speak of the way in which Norton had treated him in the church. “After all,” said Hilary, with a mutinous little toss of the head, “I have but your word for this. You tell me one tale and Colonel Norton another. Why should I trust a rebel and distrust a Royalist?” A sigh of despair broke from Gabriel at her perversity. “I can only repeat,” he said, “that I love you with all my heart and soul, but if it were to save you from wedding this vile profligate I could rejoice to see you the wife of any honourable man.” “You leap to conclusions,” she said, relenting a little, “I am in no haste to wed. There is not even a promise given yet. I merely said he loved me. But enough! Let us come into the church and you shall see what havoc Waghorn wrought there.” CHAPTER XXXVII. “_We must admit nothing which turns our worship from inward to outward, which tends to set the transitory in place of the eternal. Nothing external, however splendid and impressive, can bring us nearer to the Divine; but external things may engross and exhaust our powers of devotion. Veils of sense, no less than veils of intellect, may come between us and the spiritual, in which alone we can rest. To rest in forms is idolatry. Earth may hold us still under the guise of heaven._” --Christian Aspects of Life.--Bishop Westcott. When the two had passed through the little gate in the churchyard, and had disappeared inside the building, Peter Waghorn crept cautiously from his hiding place among the shrubs. Shaking his fist at the cross which was so obnoxious to him, he slowly made his way to his own house, his mind full of what he had overheard. The long-delayed scheme for the destruction of the cross, upon which he had set his heart, had been frustrated at the very last moment by this young captain. Doubtless, Waghorn thought, he had been secretly persuaded beforehand by the soft blandishments of the Vicar’s niece. She had discreetly kept in the background throughout the scene, but, of course, it was all really her doing.