t herself down on the
nearest chair, and tried to make up her mind how she might best treat
him in his present state of mind. As regarded the present morning
her heart was at ease. She knew that he would do now nothing of that
which she had apprehended. She could trust him not to be false in
his word to her, though she could not before have trusted him not
to commit so much heavier a sin. If he would really employ himself
from morning till night among the poor, he would be better so,--his
trouble would be easier of endurance,--than with any other employment
which he could adopt. What she most dreaded was that he should sit
idle over the fire and do nothing. When he was so seated she could
read his mind, as though it was open to her as a book. She had been
quite right when she had accused him of over-indulgence in his grief.
He did give way to it till it became a luxury to him,--a luxury which
she would not have had the heart to deny him, had she not felt it to
be of all luxuries the most pernicious. During these long hours, in
which he would sit speechless, doing nothing, he was telling himself
from minute to minute that of all God's creatures he was the most
heavily afflicted, and was revelling in the sense of the injustice
done to him. He was recalling all the facts of his life, his
education, which had been costly, and, as regarded knowledge,
successful; his vocation to the Church, when in his youth he
had determined to devote himself to the service of his Saviour,
disregarding promotion or the favour of men; the short, sweet days
of his early love, in which he had devoted himself again,--thinking
nothing of self, but everything of her; his diligent working, in
which he had ever done his very utmost for the parish in which he was
placed, and always his best for the poorest; the success of other
men who had been his compeers, and, as he too often told himself,
intellectually his inferiors; then of his children, who had been
carried off from his love to the churchyard,--over whose graves he
himself had stood, reading out the pathetic words of the funeral
service with unswerving voice and a bleeding heart; and then of
his children still living, who loved their mother so much better
than they loved him. And he would recall the circumstances of
his poverty,--how he had been driven to accept alms, to fly from
creditors, to hide himself, to see his chairs and tables seized
before the eyes of those over whom he had been set