She took out her handkerchief, and tried to calm herself as she sat back in the buggy; and he, without speaking, touched his horses with his whip and drove slowly out of the shady dell into the clear sunshine. For a mile or more of up-and-down tracking, where the wheels of the leading vehicle had left devious ruts in sand and grass to guide them, they sat side by side in silence--she fighting with and gradually overcoming her excitement, and he gravely waiting, with a not less strong emotion, until she had recovered herself. And then he turned to her, and laid his powerful hand on hers that had dropped dejectedly into her lap, and said gently, though with decision--"Now tell me, dear. What is the matter? I _must_ know. It is not--it is _not_"--contracting his fingers sharply--"that you don't mean what you have been telling me, after all? For though not in words, you _have_ been telling me, have you not?" "No," she sighed; "it is not that." "I knew it. I was sure it could not be. Then what else can matter?--what else should trouble you? Is it about your sisters? You _know_ they will be all right. They will not lose you--they will gain me. I flatter myself they will be all the better for gaining me, Elizabeth. I hoped you would think so?" "I do think so." "What then? Tell me." "Mr. Yelverton, it is so hard to tell you--I don't know how to do it. But I am afraid--I am afraid--" "Of what? Of _me?_" "Oh, no! But I want to do what is right. And it seems to me that to let myself be happy like this would be wrong--" "Wrong to let yourself be happy? Good heavens! Who has been teaching you such blasphemy as that?" "No one has taught me anything, except my mother. But she was so good, and she had so many troubles, and she said that she would never have been able to bear them--to have borne life--had she not been stayed up by her religious faith. She told us, when it seemed to her that we might some day be cast upon the world to shift for ourselves, never to let go of that--to suffer and renounce everything rather than be tempted to give up that." "Who has asked you to give it up?" he responded, with grave and gentle earnestness. "Not I. I would be the last man to dream of such a thing." "But you--_you_ have given up religion!" she broke forth, despairingly. "Have I? I don't think so. Tell me what you mean by religion?" "I mean what we have been brought up to believe." "By the churches?" "By the Church--the English Church--which I have always held to be the true Church." "My dear child, every Church holds itself to be the true Church, and all the others to be false ones. Why should yours be right any more than other people's?" "My mother taught us so," said Elizabeth.