art deny it. Various other thoughts of a similar description, but
too shadowy to bear expression, came in spite of herself through Miss
Leonora's mind. "We know that God heareth not sinners; but if any man be
a worshipper of God and doeth His will, him He heareth;" and it occurred
to her vaguely, for the first time, that she was harder to please than
her Master. Not that such an idea could get possession of a mind so well
fortified, at the first assault; but it was strange how often the
thought came back to her that the man who had thrilled through all those
people about Prickett's Lane a kind of vague sense that they were
Christians, and not hopeless wretches, forgotten of God; and who had
taken in the mysterious lodger at Mrs Hadwin's, bearing the penalty of
suspicion without complaint, would be true at his post wherever he might
be, and was a priest of God's appointing. Such were the strangely novel
ideas which went flashing through Miss Leonora's mind as she went home
to dinner, ejecting summarily the new gin-palaces and her favourite
colporteur. If anybody had stated them in words, she would have
indignantly scouted such latitudinarian stuff; but they kept flickering
in the strangest fluctuations, coming and going, bringing in native
Wentworth prejudices and natural affections to overcome all other
prepossessions, in the most inveterate, unexplainable way. For it will
be apparent that Miss Leonora, being a woman of sense, utterly scorned
the Rosa Elsworthy hypothesis, and comprehended as nearly how it
happened as it was possible for any one unaware of the facts to do.

Such were the good and bad angels who fought over the Curate's fate
while he was away. He might have been anxious if he had known anything
about them, or had been capable of imagining any such clouds as those
which overshadowed his good name in the lively imagination of
Carlingford. But Rosa Elsworthy never could have occurred to the
unconscious young man as a special danger, any more than the relenting
in the heart of his aunt Leonora could have dawned upon him as a
possible happiness. To tell the truth, he had left home, so far as he
himself was concerned, in rather a happy state of mind than otherwise,
with healthful impulses of opposition to the Rector, and confidence in
the sympathy of Lucy. To hear that Lucy had given him up, and that
Miss Leonora and Mrs Morgan were the only people who believed in him,
would have gone pretty far at this moment