He got up from his chair and looked out over the shining garden. The quiet peacefulness of a Sunday morning was in the air; hardly a breath of wind swayed the tall single dahlias, and the heavy heads of the sunflowers drooped. The great, quiet trees of the close, old but unaged, seemed a guarantee for the safety of the world, and the gray Cathedral numbered centuries to their decades. Yet, in spite of the suggestion of secure tranquility which the whole view offered, Jack felt excited and almost frightened.
“Who knows, who knows?” he said, half aloud. He paused a moment, and then walked forward, half laughing at himself.
“Falling in love is a common enough experience,” he thought, “and it is not to be treated as a tragedy. But I cannot think of it as a comedy.”
Miss Fortescue, it appeared at lunch, had thought deeply on questions of ritual, or if she had not previously thought deeply, it apparently did not stand in the way of her speaking strongly. A reredos, it seemed, was a synonym for idolatry, and the absence of an extra candle on the altar was the only plank, so to speak, which saved the English Church from being immerged in the bottomless sea of Romanism. She proposed, as an experiment, to make an offer to the chapter that she would present to the Cathedral a small chapel in honour of St. Joseph, to be erected at her expense, if they would build a corresponding one to the Virgin, and felt no doubt that the thanks and acquiescence of the Cathedral body would be accorded to her and her proposal. The ingenuity with which she twisted the arguments of the other side to tell in her favour was truly remarkable, and when, at the end of a hot half-hour, she raised her eyes to the ceiling, she was not the only person present who was grateful for a respite. She had already reduced Jack to such confusion of mind that he had founded some theory on the seven veils of the Jewish sanctuary, and though he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, Miss Fortescue had, and convinced him out of his own mouth of being a friend to the detestable enormities of the Pope of Rome.
“You say you are going to see your mother at tea-time,” she said. “Very well, tell her what I have said.”
