"

She did not look particularly like a Christian then, probably, in his
eyes. He left her, his heart bursting with love and anger. When Mary
Blanchet returned she found Minola pale and haggard, her eyes wasted
with tears.

CHAPTER XIII.

A MAN OF THE TIME.

Several days passed away, and Minola heard no more from Mr. Sheppard.
She continued in a state of much agitation; her nerves, highly strung,
were sharply jarred by the news of the approaching death of Mrs.
Saulsbury. It was almost like watching outside a door, and counting the
slow, painful hours of some lingering life within, while yet one may not
enter and look upon the pale face, and mingle with the friends or the
mourners, but is shut out and left to ask and wait; it was like this,
the time of suspense which Minola passed, not knowing whether the wife
of her father was alive or dead. As is the way of all generous natures,
it was now Minola's impulse to accuse and blame herself because there
had been so little of mutual forbearance in her old home at Keeton. She
kept wondering whether things might not have gone better, if she had
said and done this or that; or, if she had not said and done something
else. Full of this feeling, she wrote a long emotional letter to Mr.
Saulsbury, which, she begged of him to read to his wife, if she were in
a condition to hear it. The letter was suffused with generous penitence
and self-humiliation. It was a letter which perhaps no impartial person
could have read without becoming convinced that its writer must have
been in the right in most of the controversies of the past.

The letter did not reach the eyes or ears for which it was particularly
intended. Minola received a coldly forgiving answer from Mr.
Saulsbury--forgiving her upon his own account, which was more than
Minola had sought--but adding, that he had not thought it desirable to
withdraw, for a moment, by the memory of earthly controversies, the mind
of his wife from the contemplation of that well-merited heaven which was
opening upon her. Great goodness has one other advantage in addition to
all the rest over unconverted error; it can, out of its own
beatification, find a means of rebuking those with whom it is not on
terms of friendship. The expected ascent of Mrs. Saulsbury into heaven
became another means of showing poor Minola her own unworthiness. Mr.
Saulsbury closed by saying that Mrs. Saulsbury might linger yet a
little, but that her apotheosis (t