She knelt there a moment or two, her lips moving, and her black eyes cast up at the great east window, cracked and flawed with stones and poles. The Puritan boy and girl looked at her with astonishment; they had not seen this side of her before.
When she rose from her knees, her eyes seemed bright with tears, and her voice was tender.
“Forgive me, Mr. Dent,” she said, with a kind of pathetic dignity, putting out a slender be-ringed hand to him, “but—but you know—for I think perhaps you have some sympathy for us poor Catholics—you know what all this means to me.”
She went up into the chancel and looked about her in silence.
“This was the piscina, Mistress Corbet,” said the Rector.
She nodded her head regretfully, as at some relic of a dead friend; but said nothing. They came out again presently, and turned through the old iron gates into what had been the Maxwell chapel. The centre was occupied by an altar-tomb with Sir Nicholas’ parents lying in black stone upon it. Old Sir James held his right gauntlet in his left hand, and with his right hand held the right hand of his wife, which was crossed over to meet it; and the two steady faces gazed upon the disfigured roof. The altar, where a weekly requiem had been said for them, was gone, and the footpace and piscina alone showed where it had stood.
“This was a chantry, of course?” said Mistress Corbet.
The Rector confessed that it had been so.
“Ah!” she said mournfully, “the altar is cast out and the priest gone; but—but—forgive me, sir, the money is here still? But then,” she added, “I suppose the money is not a superstition.”
When they reached the west entrance again she turned and looked up the aisle again.