d moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform," she wrote
apropos of the gin-palace, and set very distinctly before her spiritual
retainers all that Providence might intend by this unexpected hindrance;
and so quite contented herself about her nephew, whose views on this and
many other subjects were so different from her own.

Meanwhile Mr Wentworth went about the rest of the day's work in a not
unusual, but far from pleasant, frame of mind. When one suddenly feels
that the sympathy upon which one calculated most surely has been
withdrawn, the shock is naturally considerable. It might not be
anything very great while it lasted, but still one feels the
difference when it is taken away. Lucy had fallen off from him; and
even aunt Dora had ceased to feel his concerns the first in the world.
He smiled at himself for the wound he felt; but that did not remove
the sting of it. After the occupations of the day were over, when at
last he was going home, and when his work and the sense of fatigue
which accompanied it had dulled his mind a little, the Curate felt
himself still dwelling on the same matter, contemplating it in a
half-comic point of view, as proud men are not unapt to contemplate
anything that mortifies them. He began to realise, in a humorous way,
his own sensations as he stood at the drawing-room door and recognised
the prodigal on the sofa; and then a smile dawned upon his lip as he
thought once more of the prodigal's elder brother, who regarded that
business with unsympathetic eyes and grudged the supper. And from that
he went into a half-professional line of thought, and imagined to
himself, half smiling, how, if he had been Dr Cumming or the minister
of Salem Chapel, he might have written a series of sermons on the
unappreciated characters of Scripture, beginning with that virtuous
uninteresting elder brother; from which suggestion, though he was not
the minister of Salem nor Dr Cumming, it occurred to the Perpetual
Curate to follow out the idea, and to think of such generous careless
souls as Esau, and such noble unfortunates as the peasant-king, the
mournful magnificent Saul--people not generally approved of, or
enrolled among the martyrs or saints. He was pursuing this kind of
half-reverie, half-thought, when he reached his own house. It was
again late and dark, for he had dined in the mean time, and was going
home now to write his sermon, in which, no doubt, some of these very
ideas were destined to