limit of Hester's powers, and that he could only
attribute the last volume to the Evil One himself.

He had hardly paid this high tribute to his sister's talent when the
door opened, and Mrs. Gresley came in in a wrapper that had once been
white.

"Dear James," she said, "is anything wrong? It is past one o'clock. Are
you never coming to bed?"

"Minna," said her pastor and master, "I have been reading the worst book
I have come across yet, and it was written by my own sister under my own
roof."

He might have added "close under the roof," if he had remembered the
little attic chamber where the cold of winter and the heat of summer had
each struck in turn and in vain at the indomitable perseverence of the
writer of those many pages.

CHAPTER XL

The only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of
opinion.--EMERSON.

Mr. Gresley was troubled, more troubled than he had ever been since a
never-to-be-forgotten period before his ordination, when he had come in
contact with worldly minds, and had had doubts as to the justice of
eternal punishment. He was apt to speak in after years of the furnace
through which he had passed, and from which nothing short of a
conversation with a bishop had had power to save him, as a great
experience which he could not regret, because it had brought him into
sympathy with so many minds. As he often said in his favorite language
of metaphor, he "had threshed out the whole subject of agnosticism, and
could consequently meet other minds still struggling in its turbid
waves."

But now again he was deeply perturbed, and it was difficult to see in
what blessing to his fellow-creatures this particular agitation would
result. He walked with bent head for hours in the garden. He could not
attend to his sermon, though it was Friday. He entirely forgot his
Bible-class at the alms-houses in the afternoon.

Mrs. Gresley watched him from her bedroom window, where she was mending
the children's stockings. At last she laid aside her work and went out.

She might not be his mental equal. She might be unable, with her small
feminine mind, to fathom the depths and heights of that great
intelligence, but still she was his wife. Perhaps, though she did not
know it, it troubled her to see him so absorbed in his sister, for she
was sure it was of Hester and her book that he was thinking. "I am his
wife," she said to herself, as she joined him in silence, and passed her