oth
foolish, wrong and right, to the utmost bounds of human possibility. How
different they felt themselves standing there, and yet how much at one
they were without knowing it! Northcote had sufficient knowledge to
admire the perfect old building. He followed his guide with a certain
humility through the details, which Reginald had already learned by
heart.

"There is nothing so perfect, so beautiful, so real now-a-days," said
the young Churchman, with a natural expansion of mind over the beauty to
which he had fallen heir. It seemed to him, as he looked up at the tall
windows with their graceful tracery, that he was the representative of
all who had worked out their belief in God within these beautiful walls,
and of all the perpetual worshippers who had knelt among the old brasses
of the early founders upon the worn floor. The other stood beside him
with a half envy in his mind. The Dissenter did not feel himself the
heir of those centuries in the same unhesitating way. He tried to feel
that he was the heir of something better and more spiritual, yet felt a
not ungenerous grudge that he could not share the other kinship too.

"It is very beautiful and noble," he said. "I should like to feel for it
as you do; but what I should like still better would be to have the same
clear certainty of faith, the same conviction that what they were doing
was the only right thing to do which made both building and prayer so
unfaltering in those days. We can't be so sure even of the span of an
arch now."

"No--nor can you be content with the old span, even though it is clearly
the best by all rules," said Reginald. The other smiled; he was the most
speculative of the two, being perhaps the most thoughtful; and he had no
fifteenth-century chapel to charm, nor old foundation to give him an
anchor. He smiled, but there was a little envy in his mind. Even to have
one's life set out before one within clear lines like this, would not
that be something? If it had but been possible, no doubt saying prayers
for the world, even with no b