"What book?" asked Horatia, mystified.
"The priest's book, the breviary. It was lying open on his table when we went in to see him at the college of Oriel. Almost I fancied myself chez Monsignor de la Roche-Guyon, my cousin."
"Oh, I understand!" said Horatia. "He is translating some of the hymns from the Paris Breviary—why, I don't know. I think I remember Tristram telling me about it in the spring. Mr. Dormer and several of the other Fellows at Oriel are what is known as High Church, and they are always doing queer things."
"High Church?" queried the young Frenchman, "what is that? And what queer things is it that they do?"
"Oh, it's so boring," said Miss Grenville wearily. "They think the Church of England is in danger; I don't know why, for it has gone on comfortably enough all these years without them. So they meet and talk a great deal about it—in fact, that is no doubt why Tristram has so tiresomely to go into Oxford this evening—fresh alarums and excursions, I expect... Papa was very much shocked when he heard Mr. Froude say that the Reformation was a mistake, but when I told him afterwards that I thought they had better all turn Papists, and have done with it, he didn't like that either ... O forgive me! What have I said!" The colour rushed over her face. "I had forgotten for the moment; of course you are a Catholic yourself."
"But I had rather that you forgot it," exclaimed the young Frenchman, with an expressive gesture. "I am a Catholic, it is true, because—well, because one has to be. Royalism and the Church stand together; but I am not devout—pray do not think so!"
Horatia hastened to assure him that she had never suspected him of this, and they both laughed.
When he had gone she went upstairs and looked at the gown that she was to wear that night to dance in the palace which would crumble to ruins at daybreak.
(2)
The aching elbows of the fiddlers had several times been eased by surreptitious potations; the candles were beginning to gutter, chaperons' heads to nod sleepily. A light dust hung in the air from the action of so many pairs of twinkling feet upon the beeswax, and the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville was distinctly conscious of a desire for his bed. Nor did the converse in which he was entangled with an elderly entomologist staying in the neighbourhood really reconcile him to sitting through so many quadrilles and country dances—to hearing selections from La Gazza Ladra give place to Basque Roads, Der Freischütz to Drops of Brandy. The Rector had no enthusiasm for lepidoptera, and he could by no means get the collector of beetles to listen to his own views on monoliths. Not inappropriately did the entomologist discourse of the butterflies of Berkshire, its obscurer moths, in this big room cleared for the Charity Ball and full of a throng as bright and moving, but the scientific mind does not unbend to these analogies, and it might have been conjectured that he did not even see the fair guests had he not, during a waltz, suddenly inquired: