oul--beholding
a possible life which she had sinned herself away from.

She was found in this way, crushed on the floor. Such grief seemed
natural in a poor lady whose husband had been drowned in her presence.

BOOK VIII.--FRUIT AND SEED.

CHAPTER LVIII.

"Much adoe there was, God wot;
He wold love and she wold not."
--NICHOLAS BRETON.

Extension, we know, is a very imperfect measure of things; and the
length of the sun's journeying can no more tell us how life has
advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be
active within it. A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may
meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or
eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of
races; or he may head an expedition that opens new continental
pathways, get himself mained in body, and go through a whole heroic
poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may
come back to find his neighbors grumbling at the same parish grievance
as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement
in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive
butcher's boy, and pausing at the same shop-window to look at the same
prints. If the swiftest thinking has about the pace of a greyhound, the
slowest must be supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent
sticking, which after a good while is discerned to be a slight
progression. Such differences are manifest in the variable intensity
which we call human experience, from the revolutionary rush of change
which makes a new inner and outer life, to that quiet recurrence of the
familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the
heavens.

Something of this contrast was seen in the year's experience which had
turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery
Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness
where it would have been her happiness to be held worthy; while it had
left her family in Pennicote without deeper change than that of some
outward habits, and some adjustment of prospects and intentions to
reduced income, fewer visits, and fainter compliments. The rectory was
as pleasant a home as before: and the red and pink peonies on the lawn,
the rows of hollyhocks by the hedges, had bloomed as well this year as
last: the rector maintained his cheerful confidence in the good will