"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church--and your father's from outside. But that might make all the difference to her." "I don't think so. It is"--she faltered--"the change itself. It is all so terrible to her." "Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to her--force itself upon her--as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked, sadly. "Ah!--if it didn't in my father's case--" The girl's eyes filled with tears. But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell, with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl--delicacy of feeling in the man--prevented it. None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet take a woman out of herself. The level sun shone full upon her as she walked beside him, and her face, her simple dress, her attitude stole gradually like a spell on the mind of her companion. It was a remarkable face; the lower lip a little prominent, and the chin firmly rounded. But the smile, though rare, was youth and sweetness itself, and the dark eyes beneath the full mass of richly coloured hair were finely conscious and attentive--disinterested also; so that they won the spectator instead of embarrassing him. She was very lightly and slenderly made, yet so as to convey an impression of strength and physical health. Meynell said to himself that there was something cloistered in her look, like one brought up in a grave atmosphere--an atmosphere of "recollection." At the same time nothing could be merrier--more childish even--than her laugh.