leaden storms, or in fragrant amber-aired summer days?  Would worldly vampires, such as political or financial schemes, track a man’s footsteps down the aisle, and flap their fatal numbing pinions over his soul so securely even in the Sanctuary of the Lord, if from his family pew his eyes wandered now and then to the marble slab that lay like a benediction over the silver head of an honoured father or mother, or the silent form of a beloved wife, sister, or brother?

Is there a woman so callous, so steeped in folly, that the tinsel of Vanity Fair, the paraphernalia of fashion, or all the thousand small fiends that beleaguer the female soul, could successfully lure her imagination from holy themes, when sitting in front of the pulpit, she yet sees through the open windows where butterflies like happy souls flutter in and out the motionless chiselled cenotaph that rests like a sentinel above the pulseless heart that once enshrined her image, called her wife, and beat in changeless devotion against her own; or the little grassy billow sown thick with violets that speak to her of the blue eyes beneath them, where in dreamless slumber that needs no mother’s cradling arms, no maternal lullaby, reposes the waxen form, the darling golden head of her long-lost baby?  What spot so peculiarly suited for “God’s acre” as that surrounding God’s temple?

A residence of dearly four years’ duration at the parsonage had rendered this quiet churchyard a favourite retreat with Regina, and, divesting the graves of all superstitious terrors, had awakened in her nature only a most profound and loving reverence for the precincts of the dead.

To-day, longing for some secluded spot in which to indulge the melancholy feelings that oppressed her, she instinctively sought the church, yielding unconscious homage to its hallowed and soothing influence.  Passing slowly and carefully among the head-stones, she went into the church, to which she had access at all times by a key, which enabled her to enter at will and practise on the small organ that was generally used in Sabbath-school music.

Fancying that it might be cooler in the gallery, she ascended to the organ loft, and while Hero stretched himself at her feet, she sat down on one of the benches close to the open window that looked toward the mass of trees which so completely embowered the parsonage, that only one ivy-crowned chimney was visible.  Low in the sky, and just opposite the tall arched window behind the pulpit, the sun burned like a baleful Cyclopean eye, striking through a mass of ruby tinted glass that had been designed to represent a lion, and other symbols of the Redeemer, who soared away above them.

Are there certain subtle electrical currents sheathed in human flesh that link us sometimes with the agitated reservoirs of electricity trembling in the bosom of yet distant clouds?  Do not our own highly charged nervous batteries occasionally give the first premonition of coming thunderstorms?  Long before the low angry growl that came suddenly from some lightning lair in the far south, below the sky-line, Regina anticipated the approaching war of elements, and settled herself to wait for it.