Night came on, the church was locked, and all was dark save a small golden flame that burned suspended in air. A watcher sat far back in one of the seats, but after a while drew nearer, still sitting, not kneeling. The whole place was full of silence and a sense of waiting. In the shade, the stations hung unseen, but not unfelt. He had seen them that day, and they spoke through the dark, "Here he fell! Here he was struck! Here he was nailed to the cross!"
There was in this darkness and silence such a vacuum of the earthly, that the heavenly seemed to break through the thin wall of sense and flow around the soul.
When the priest came in at daybreak, he found his penitent prostrate before the altar. After Mass was over, the baptism took place.
The father was struck by the countenance of his convert. It wore a rapt and exalted expression, and he appeared to see nothing of what was visibly before his eyes.
"God bless you!" he said to Dick on going out of the church. "Come to see me. And for a while try to think of God entirely, and not of Miss Edith Yorke."
"Sir," said Dick quietly, "I have thought of Edith Yorke but once since I entered the church last night; and then it was as though the Blessed Virgin put her aside and stood in her place."
TO BE CONTINUED.
A PAGE OF THE PAST AND A SHADOW OF THE FUTURE.
It is, perhaps, hardly to be believed, in this new country whose mental geology grows and changes so quickly that one stratum of thought and of circumstances is gone even before one has had time to analyze it—it is, perhaps, hardly to be believed that the shadow of the penal laws in the mother-country should still cloud with lingering touches the reminiscences of a yet unfaded life. Young people whose ideas and education belong to this century can still remember one of those priests of old—one of those silent champions—whom the English law made outcasts from their kind, and fair game for their enemies.