MARY PREACHES AND THE COLONEL PREVAILS

A fortnight had gone by, and during this time Morris was a frequent
visitor at Seaview. Also his Cousin Mary had come over twice or thrice
to lunch, with her father or without him. Once, indeed, she had stopped
all the afternoon, spending most of it in the workshop with Morris. This
workshop, it may be remembered, was the old chapel of the Abbey, a very
beautiful and still perfect building, finished in early Tudor times, in
which, by good fortune, the rich stained glass of the east window still
remained. It made a noble and spacious laboratory, with its wide nave
and lovely roof of chestnut wood, whereof the corbels were seraphs,
white-robed and golden-winged.

"Are you not afraid to desecrate such a place with your horrid vices--I
mean the iron things--and furnace and litter?" asked Mary. She had sunk
down upon an anvil, on which lay a newspaper, the first seat that she
could find, and thence surveyed the strange, incongruous scene.

"Well, if you ask, I don't like it," answered Morris. "But there is no
other place that I can have, for my father is afraid of the forge in the
house, and I can't afford to build a workshop outside."

"It ought to be restored," said Mary, "with a beautiful organ in a
carved case and a lovely alabaster altar and one of those perpetual
lamps of silver--the French call them 'veilleuses', don't they?--and the
Stations of the Cross in carved oak, and all the rest of it."

Mary, it may be explained, had a tendency to admire the outward
adornments of ritualism if not its doctrines.