Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within.  One of the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture the school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head, and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of the shower without.  There was no one there but themselves.  The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and no penitent knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted lamp.  The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads; the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they heard themselves breathe as they crept from picture to picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young priest appeared in a long black robe, and with shaven head.  He, too as he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when he approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed courteously, it seemed impossible he should speak.  But he spoke, the pale young priest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an age and a church that are passing.

“Do you understand French, monsieur?”

“A very little, monsieur.”

“A very little is more than my English,” he said, yet he politely went the round of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the painters between his crossings at the different altars.  At the high altar there was a very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one knee.  “Fine picture, fine altar, fine church,” he said in English.  At last they stopped next the poor-box.  As their coins clinked against those within, he smiled serenely upon the good heretics.  Then he bowed, and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished through the narrow door by which he had entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps.  Then she cried,

“O, why didn’t something happen?”

“Ah, my dear! what could have keen half so good as the nothing that did happen?  Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a disappointment in love:  how common it would have made him; everybody has been crossed in love once or twice.”  He bade the driver take them back to the hotel.  “This is the very bouquet of adventure why should we care for the grosser body?  I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young priest, we should not think him half so interesting as we do now.”

At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses in guessing the nationality of the different persons, and in wondering if the Canadians did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of their clothes and whiskers.  Must they found even their health upon the health of the mother-country?