Ivy looked much disheartened, and to change the subject Ralph suggested that they should go together to the Abbey. This pleased her, she forgot the Scotch tour and only revelled in the bliss of the present. To walk to church on Christmas day with her ideal man, to feel the subtle influence of the beautiful Abbey, the lights, the music, the religious atmosphere, seemed to her a sort of foretaste of heaven, a slightly sensuous heaven perhaps, but the highest she was as yet capable of imagining. Ralph was not sorry to have the child with him, for his Christmas had been lonely enough. But his thoughts wandered far away from her during the service. He was back again at Whinhaven listening to his father’s voice, or he was with Evereld and her governess listening to solemn old chorales at Dresden. Presently a very slight thing recalled him to his actual surroundings. The sermon was about to begin and some one sitting in front of him rose to go just as the text was given out: “And in the fulness of time God sent------” He heard no more for the vacant place had revealed to him, at a little distance in front, a profile which arrested his whole attention. Something in its earnest, absorbed expression, in its exquisite purity, in the listening look of one who is eager to learn, appealed to him strongly. Then suddenly his heart gave a bound, for it was borne in upon him that he was looking at Evereld. Not the Evereld he had left on that summer day as a playmate and comrade, but a new Evereld who had developed into a woman--the one woman in all the world for him. He did not wish the sermon ended, he could have been almost content to sit on there for ever just watching her; that curious description of heaven as a place “Where congregations ne’er break up, And Sabbaths never end,”-- a notion which has cast a gloom over so many children’s hearts, seemed to him in his present mood after all not so impossible. When the service was really over, and the people began to disperse, he was in a fever lest he should be unable to reach her, and it was not until he had discovered that Bridget was her companion that he could feel at all secure of any real talk with her. Ivy, quite unconscious of all this, wondered a little when he paused in the nave; but she did not at all object to standing there with him, looking into the dim beauty of the stately building, and with a proud little consciousness that many people glanced at them as they passed by. It was so nice, she reflected, to go to church with a man like Ralph, a man wholly unlike any other she had yet come across in her short and rather dreary life.