"I wish I had your faith. Miss Drayton," said the Captain with a sigh.
"I am sure I wish you had, Captain Villiers," replied Kate earnestly. "I would not be without it, weak as it often is, for worlds. But you may have it. You have the strongest grounds for having it. But alas! I lived without it myself till very recently."
"I have not been unobservant, Miss Drayton," continued the Captain, "of the—what shall I say?—the moral transfiguration of your character. It has been an argument as to the spiritual reality of religion that I could not gainsay. I have always observed its outward forms. I was duly baptized and confirmed, and have regularly taken the sacrament. But I feel the need of something more—something which I am sure my mother had, for if there ever was a saint on earth she is one."
"I can only send you," said Kate, "to the Great Teacher, who says 'Come unto Me and I will give you rest.' I am trying to sit at His feet and learn of Him. He will guide you into all truth."
"Amen!" solemnly answered the young man. After a pause he went on, "Miss Drayton, I make bold to ask a favour. Perhaps it may be a last one. Those hymns I have heard you sing come strangely home to my own heart. They awaken yearnings I never felt, and reveal truths I never saw before. May I take the liberty of asking the loan of your hymn-book? Even my mother, with her horror of dissent, would not object to the writings of so staunch a Churchman as the Rev. Charles Wesley."
"If you will do me the favour to accept it, I shall be most happy to give it you," replied Kate. "May it be a great help to you as it has been to me."
"You greatly honour me by your kindness," said the Captain. Drawing his small gold-clasped Prayer Book, on which was engraven his crest—a cross raguled with a wyvern volant—from the breast-pocket of his coat, he said, "Will you do me the further honour of accepting this book. The prayers I know by heart, and I think that, even though a dissenter," he added with a smile, "you will admire them."
"Thanks. I do admire them, very much," said Kate, who was quite familiar with the beautiful service of her father's Church.
The Captain stooped as they were walking through the little garden, which they had now reached, and plucking a few leaves and flowers, placed them in the book, saying in the words of the fair distraught Ophelia,—
"There is rosemary, that's for rememberance;
And there is pansies, that's for thoughts."