his doubts like others, and like
most people was aware that there were a great many things in heaven and
earth totally unexplainable by any philosophy. But he had always been
more of a man than a thinker, even before he became a high Anglican; and
being still much in earnest about most things he had to do with, he
found great comfort just at this moment, amid all his perplexities, in
the litany he was saying. He was so absorbed in it, and so full of that
appeal out of all troubles and miseries to the God who cannot be
indifferent to His creatures, that he was almost at the last Amen before
he distinguished that voice, which of all voices was most dear to him.
The heart of the young man swelled, when he heard it, with a mingled
thrill of sympathy and wounded feeling. She had not left her father's
sick-bed to see _him_, but she _had_ found time to run down the sunny
road to St Roque's to pray for the sick and the poor. When he knelt down
in the reading-desk at the end of the service, was it wrong, instead of
more abstract supplications, that the young priest said over and over,
"God bless her," in an outburst of pity and tenderness? And he did not
try to overtake her on the road, as he might have done had his heart
been less deeply touched, but went off with abstracted looks to
Wharfside, where all the poor people were very glad to see him, and
where his absence was spoken of as if he had been three months instead
of three days away. It was like going back a century or two into
primitive life, to go into "the district," where civilisation did not
prevail to any very distressing extent, and where people in general
spoke their minds freely. But even when he came out of No. 10, where the
poor woman still kept on living, Mr Wentworth was made aware of his
private troubles; for on the opposite side of the way, where there was a
little bit of vacant ground, the Rector was standing with some of the
schismatics of Wharfside, planning how to place the iron church which,
it was said, he meant to establish in the very heart of the "district."
Mr Morgan took off his hat very stiffly to the Perpetual Curate, who
returned up Prickett's Lane with a heightened colour and quickened
pulse. A man must be an angel indeed who can see his work taken out of
his hands and betray no human emotion. Mr Wentworth went into
Elsworthy's, as he went back, to write a forcible little note to the
Rector on the subject before he returned home. It was Rosa w