It was at night, for the liturgy had been abolished six months before, and was unlawful, and the Vicar risked something in suffering it to be read even by Lady Lucy's chaplain, as it was. And we honoured him and Placidia for the venture. Roger had asked to be one of the bearers. Aunt Gretel, Rachel Forster, and I, waited for them in the church-porch. Slowly through the silent summer-night came the heavy tramp of the bearers, until they paused and laid their burden down under the old Lych Gate. Then, while they came up the churchyard, we crept quietly back into the church, dark in all parts except where the funeral torches lit up a little space around the open vault, and threw strange flickering shadows on the recumbent forms of the dead of Harry Davenant's race, knight and dame, priest and crusader. It made them look as if they moved, to meet him; for none of the living men of his house were there, although of all his race none had fallen more bravely. Behind the bier followed four women closely veiled. The first, by the height and movement, I knew was his Mother, and at her side, as the sacred words were read, knelt Lettice. I think in times of overwhelming joy or sorrow, when no words could fathom the depths of the heart, when almost every human voice would fall outside it altogether, or jar rudely if it reached within, there is a wonderful comfort in the calm of those ancient immutable liturgies. They are a channel worn deep by the joys and sorrows of ages. Their changelessness links them to eternity, and seems thus to make room for the sorrow which overflows the narrow measures of thought and time. "Delivered from the burden of the flesh," "are in joy and liberty," "not to be sorry as men without hope for them that sleep in Him, that when we shall depart this life, we may rest on Him as our hope is, this our brother doth." How tranquilly the simple words sank into the very depths of the heart. All the more precious and sacred, doubtless, for the tender sanctity which ever invests a proscribed religion. Not that our Puritan faith is without its liturgies. Older than England, and older than Christendom, fused in the burning heart of the king of old, warrior, patriot, exile, conqueror, and penitent. But it is a perilous thing to make services like those of the Church of England, dear enough already to every faithful heart who has used them from infancy, dearer still by making them dangerous. I never knew how I loved them till we lost them. And as that night the sacred, simple, time-honoured words fell like heavenly music among the shadows of the dim old church, I felt as if the decree which made them unlawful, and the grave of the brother slain at Naseby, were slowly mining a gulf which could never be crossed between the Draytons and the Davenants.