“Are they all mad, or what is it?” the Duchess whispered. “I have never seen such a thing before in my life, except when I was abroad, in Roman Catholic society. But even they don’t kneel to their priests, only to a Bishop.” Hero blushed guiltily. She was better informed than the Duchess, but she was not sure that her knowledge might not damage her in her friend’s eyes. “Perhaps these people regard Dr. Coles as a Bishop,” she suggested timidly. “Have you never heard it whispered that he had been secretly consecrated by--an Armenian Bishop, I think?” The Duchess stared at her in honest bewilderment. “How could that be? I don’t understand. Why should an English clergyman go to Armenia to be consecrated?” Hero saw that she must make her revelation complete. “I understand the object was to renew the Apostolical Succession in the Church of England.” “It has never been broken,” said the Duchess, with decision. She had been told so as a girl, and had never given the subject a second thought. To her devout mind, too candid to be taken in logical snares, the presence or absence of one or two or three Bishops at the consecration of another could not seem a matter of real concern. To attribute to such details the awful consequences they possess for Catholic minds would have seemed to her to attribute the technical instincts of a small attorney to the Maker of the sun and stars. “The Pope of Rome refuses to recognize Anglican Orders, you know,” Hero explained gently. “The application was made to him the other day by Lord Bargreave on behalf of a third of the clergy, and he told them that the English Church had no Bishops, no priests, and no Sacraments.” The Duchess flushed to the roots of her hair. “When I was a girl,” she said sternly, “the Church of England would have refused to recognize the Pope of Rome. I was brought up to believe that the Roman communion was a half-pagan, half-political body, which had corrupted the Gospel with idolatry and superstition, and forfeited its right to be called a Christian Church.” It was Hero’s turn to be astonished as she listened to the language of an extinct generation. Brought up in the age which had witnessed the triumph of the Ritualist propaganda, it was news to her that the national Church had ever occupied any attitude but one of envious imitation or suppliant apology towards that of Rome. And yet Hero Vanbrugh was a girl who had read a good deal, travelled much, and used her own powers of observation and reasoning. She had seen the ignorant priesthoods of Spain and Italy, and their brutish flocks, the most degraded element in the European population. The sight of the Rev. Aloysius Grimes cringing to Mike Finigan had roused her indignation. And yet the spectacle of a great society of Grimeses cringing to Mike Finigan’s master, in the name of Elizabeth’s and Cromwell’s countrymen, had scarcely moved her to a passing sigh. “Times have changed,” she murmured to the Duchess.