Lancelot understood her.

'How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness?'

'What! with a cigar and a fishing-rod?'

'Certainly. Why not?'

Argemone really could not tell at the moment. The answer upset her
scheme entirely.

'Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of
worship?' continued our hero. 'How can we better glorify the worker
than by delighting in his work?'

'Ah!' sighed the lady, 'why trust to these self-willed methods, and
neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared
for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?'

'EVERY feeling, Miss Lavington?'

Argemone hesitated. She had made the good old stock assertion, as
in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were
several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which
seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.

'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, 'is only the heaven and the
earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the
sense to be silent, and "hear my mother sing;" my priests and
preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud. Am I not