'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, 'is only the heaven and the earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the sense to be silent, and "hear my mother sing;" my priests and preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not well enough furnished? Do you want to reduce my circular infinite chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one? My sphere harmonies to the Gregorian tones in four parts? My world-wide priesthood, with their endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a white sheet? And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the blue-bells ringing God's praises, as they do in "The story without an End," for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which they neither feel nor understand a word?' Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast. Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while as if there was solemn earnest under the surface. 'Oh, Mr. Smith!' she said, 'how can you dare talk so of a liturgy compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages! You revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!' 'There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love it.' 'Oh,' she said hopefully, 'that you would but try the Church system! How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every thought for you! But I cannot explain myself. Why not go to our vicar and open your doubts to him?' 'Pardon, but you must excuse me.' 'Why? He is one of the saintliest of men!' 'To tell the truth, I have been to him already.' 'You do not mean it! And what did he tell you?' 'What the rest of the world does--hearsays.' 'But did you not find him most kind?' 'I went to him to be comforted and guided. He received me as a criminal. He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to tell me any.' 'And what did he tell you?'