he might see Ursula at a door or window.
Clarence had seized upon him and dragged him in, in spite of himself.

"On the contrary, I am very glad to see him," said Mr. May, with a
smile. He looked at the young Dissenter with a jeer in his eyes. He
liked to punish him, having suddenly perceived that this jeer was much
more potent than any serious penalty. "If he will promise not to slay
me, I shan't quarrel with him." Mr. May was in such good spirits at this
moment that he could afford to joke; his own magnanimity, and the
other's confused looks of guilt, overcame his gravity. "Come back
again," he said, holding out his hand; and though Horace retired for the
moment utterly confounded, yet the attractions of the cheerful house
overcame, after a while, his sense of humiliation and inappropriateness.
If the injured family had condoned his offence, why should he mind? and
the pleasant girlish friendliness, without any _arriere pensee_, of
Ursula, was enough to have set any man at his ease; the facts of the
case being that Mrs. Hurst was away upon a long visit, and that, having
no other gossip within the range of her acquaintance, Ursula did not
know. Reginald, who did, had the same sense of magnanimity as his father
had, and began to like the society of the congenial yet different spirit
which it was so strange to him to find under a guise so unlike his own.
And Northcote, on his side, finding no house to which he could betake
himself among those whom Phoebe called "our own people;" found a refuge,
which gradually became dearer and dearer to him, at the Parsonage, and
in his profound sense of the generosity of the people who had thus
received him, felt his own partizanship wax feebler and feebler every
day. He seemed to see the ground cut from under his feet, as he watched
the young chaplain at his work. Mr. May, to be sure, was no example of
pastoral diligence, but he was a pleasant companion, and had put himself
from the first in that position of moral superiority which naturally
belongs to an injured person who can forgive heartily and without
prejudice. And Ursula! He did not venture to call her Ursula, even in
the secret depths of his heart. There a pronoun was enough, as, indeed,
incipient Love generally finds it. She spoke to him, smiled at him in
the street; and immediately life became a _Vita Nuova_ to him. The young
Dissenter was as Dante, and simple Ursula, with her housekeeping books
in her hand, became another B