They penetrated through an old mill to its back premises, and climbed precariously round the water-wheel to reach a little moss-grown platform from which the few remaining massive stones of the Norman wall and castle could still be seen.

The old abbey kept them a good while, Julie interested Peter enormously as they walked about its cool aisles, and tried to make out the legends of its ancient glass.

She had nothing of that curious kind of shyness most people have in a church, and that he would certainly have expected of her.

She joked and laughed a little in it--at a queer row of mutilated statues packed into a kind of chapel to keep quiet out of the way till wanted, at the vivid red of the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh and all his host--but not in the least irreverently.

He recalled a saying of a book he had once read in which a Roman Catholic priest had defended the homeliness of an Italian congregation by saying that it was right for them to be at home in their Father's House.