the door and listened to his friend's warning concerning the Rector's
daughter. Derrick's words were simple enough in themselves, but they had
fallen upon the young Curate's ears with startling significance. He had
given this significance to them himself,--in spite of himself,--and
then all at once he had fallen to wondering why it was that he had never
thought of such a possible denouement before. It was so very possible,
so very probable; nay, when he came to think of it seriously, it was
only impossible that it should not be. He had often told him-self, that
some day a lover would come who would be worthy of the woman he had not
even hoped to win. And who was more worthy than Fergus Derrick--who was
more like the hero to whom such women surrender their hearts and lives.
If he himself had been such a man, he thought with the simplicity of
affection, he would not have felt that there was need for fear. And the
two had been thrown so much together and would be thrown together so
frequently in the future. He remembered how Fergus had been taken into
the family circle, and calling to mind a hundred trifling incidents,
smiled at his own blindness. When the next day he received Anice's
message, he received it as an almost positive confirmation. It was not
like her to bestow favors from an idle impulse.

It was not so easy now to meet the girl in his visits to the Rectory: it
was not easy to listen to Mr. Barholm while Anice and Fergus Derrick
sat apart and talked. Sometimes he wondered if the time could ever come,
when his friend would be less his friend because he had rivalled him.
The idea of such a possibility only brought him fresh pain. His gentle
chivalric nature shrank within itself at the thought of the bereavement
that double loss would be. There was little room in his mind for
the envies of stronger men. Certainly Fergus had no suspicion of the
existence of his secret pain. He found no alteration in his gentle
friend.

Among the Reverend Paul's private ventures was a small night school
which he had managed to establish by slow degrees. He had picked up a
reluctant scholar here, and one there,--two or three pit lads, two or
three girls, and two or three men for whose attendance he had worked so
hard and waited so long that he was quite surprised at his success in
the end. He scarcely knew how he had managed it, but the pupils were
there in the dingy room of the National School, waiting for him on two
nights in t