"What fine pearls!" observed Maurice. "I have never seen such large ones, except on a rope that Maman used to wear. Now she hardly wears any jewels."

"These were your mother's," said Tristram. "She wished to give all her personal jewels—all except those belonging to your family, which will come one day to your wife." (He always spoke to Maurice in a matter-of-fact way, as though Maurice were grown up.) "And here, you see, set in the paten, is a little old Anglo-Saxon brooch that she used to wear as a girl, and which she gave to me long ago.—Now I'll show you the church."

Maurice bore away from that visit an impression of surprising dignity, simplicity, and space. He had seen the raised chancel, the still more raised sanctuary, the stone altar, which it was doubtful if the Bishop would consecrate, and the beautiful marble font, a memorial to his grandfather Grenville, set in almost equal honour in the apse at the west end. He had been told that there would be no galleries or pews, that the church was to be quite free and always open, and that one day a great cross or crucifix would hang from the roof. As they left he caught sight of a little inscription on a stone let into the wall near the door—"Pray for the sinner who built this church."

Going through the porch he said, reflectively, "I suppose that as it is such a large church he was a very wicked man."

But Tristram gave no answer.

Maurice had looked forward to his next Christmas in the new clergy-house, and next Christmas had, indeed, found him there, but in company with Mr. Dormer and great gloom—unwelcome circumstances which it took him some time to connect with a certain notable conversion to his own communion in the previous October. But what mattered to Maurice was much less that the Church of England had lost John Henry Newman, than that the Church of the Passion was now offering a haven among its priests to its founder, and that the centre of interest at the clergy-house had shifted from him, Maurice, to the man who was mourning not only the defection of a leader but the loss of a friend.

But when next he came to scale the church roof and plague the curates, Mr. Dormer seemed to have gone, not to Oxford but to London, and careful cross-questioning of the new deacon elicited facts which, to Maurice's mind, could only mean that Mr. Dormer would perhaps one day become a monk. How this could be, even in the Church of England as explained by Tristram, was a mystery, but since such a calling presupposed a fixed abode, and, for the time being, Mr. Dormer was certainly settled in London, Maurice had got all the information that he wanted. There was no cloud now upon a visit to Uncle Tristram, and one delightful summer even brought his mother to stay at the hotel in the fashionable quarter of the town. By a coincidence, which Maurice was not able to appreciate, the arrival of the French comtesse was recorded in close proximity to "More Popish Practices of a Puseyite Priest."

A kind of sporting interest in the Tractarian Movement was a curious possession for a French soldier and a sound Catholic. Yet, just when the English newspapers were full of the battle of the Alma, the post bore to Tristram, recently inhibited for hearing confessions, a letter from the seat of war adjuring him to stick to his guns, and this from a young man who knew that an Anglican clergyman cannot bind or loose, whatever the opinions of his bishop.

At this moment, however, the writer of that epistle had some grounds for wishing that the inhibition had not been removed, or that Tristram's invalid absolutions were not sought at such a late hour. Looking round for something to occupy him, the Duc de la Roche-Guyon caught sight of a heap of Punches in a corner. He guessed why they were there. Mr. Punch was strongly, even rabidly, "anti-Puseyite," and it was characteristic of Tristram cheerfully to preserve the numbers in which this guardian of public morals had also constituted himself Defender of the Faith. Here, for instance, was the succession of last year's cartoons dealing with the alleged Romanist tendencies of "Soapy Samuel," the Bishop of Oxford, and the Puseyite cleric being kicked downstairs by the united boots of Mr. Punch and John Bull. After what he had just heard about St. George's-in-the-East, Maurice was not greatly surprised to find Mr. Punch warning "reverend gents who think fit to make images, figures, or guys of themselves" to beware of an "iconoclastic spirit" which plainly had his approval. In the current number itself, the Rector of St. George's, in a notice headed "Nathan's Clerical Costumes," addressed to "sacristans, footmen of the superior Roman Catholic clergy and others," was made to express himself desirous of purchasing "any amount of the left-off vestments of priests" and to offer "a liberal allowance for holy candle ends and waste incense."

Maurice put down the paper with a shrug, but as he stooped to pick up a number which had fallen open on the floor, his eye was caught by the words "Margaret Street" and "All Saints":—