“I am very glad to see you, my dear Roderick,” said Miss Burnett, gravely; “as glad as I can be about anything in this carnal life,” added the old lady, whose spirits had been revived that morning by a rise of one and a quarter per cent. in the value of her pet investment. “But we are taught not to rejoice, Roderick, except in that which----Is that a hothouse flower, my dear?” inquired Miss Burnett, looking sharply at the myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole. “Dear, dear! what an extravagant age it is! You are looking very well, my dear Roderick. I dare say you are what a worldly-minded person would call very handsome; but we must try to remember that we are all worms,” murmured the old lady with a doleful sigh; for she took the gloomy view of things which is so common to some people who read that Gospel which is all life and colour and brightness, full of the happy faces of merry-makers at a bridal festival, and little children gathering round a favourite Teacher’s knees, radiant with sudden rejoicings in mourning households, the dead restored to smile upon the living. There is something strange in the dull grey tint which some worshippers are able to infuse into a story that a painter can hardly read without feeling the tropical heat of a meridian sun, the perfume of a thousand lilies, the spicy odours of the feathery palms, and the free dash of Galilee’s blue waves about the prow of a fisherman’s frail bark sailing gaily under an Eastern sky. Surely the richness of colour with which the Catholic Church invests the Christian faith is, after all, only the natural attribute of a religion which arose amid the splendour and beauty of the Holy Land! “I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise which you gave me before leaving England.” “My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully mystified by this address, “I assure you that I----” He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue. “Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation; “and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of ROME!” The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation, and then tackled her nephew once more. “You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.