rt, hurts in
the strength of the second lie in which it is folded--a likeness to the
truth. It would have mattered little that she was driven from line after
line of her defense, had she not, while she seemed to herself to be its
champion, actually lost sight of that for which she thought she was
striving.

It added much to Faber's influence on Juliet, that a tone of pathos and
an element of poetry generally pervaded the forms of his denial. The
tone was the more penetrating that it veiled the pride behind it all,
the pride namely of an unhealthy conscious individuality, the pride of
_self_ as self, which makes a man the center of his own universe, and a
mockery to all the demons of the real universe. That man only who rises
above the small yet mighty predilection, who sets the self of his own
consciousness behind his back, and cherishes only the self of the
Father's thought, the angel that beholds the eternal face, that man only
is a free and noble being, he only breathes the air of the infinite.
Another may well deny the existence of any such Father, any such
infinite, for he knows nothing of the nature of either, and his
testimony for it would be as worthless as that is which he gives against
it.

The nature of Juliet Meredith was true and trusting--but in respect of
her mother she had been sown in weakness, and she was not yet raised in
strength. Because of his wife, Captain Meredith had more than once had
to exchange regiments. But from him Juliet had inherited a certain
strength of honest purpose, which had stood him in better stead than the
whole sum of his gifts and acquirements, which was by no means
despicable.

Late one lovely evening in the early summer, they sat together in the
dusky parlor of the cottage, with the window to the garden open. The
sweetest of western airs came in, with a faint scent chiefly of damp
earth, moss, and primroses, in which, to the pensive imagination, the
faded yellow of the sunset seemed to bear a part.

"I am sorry to say we must shut the window, Miss Meredith," said the
doctor, rising. "You must always be jealous of the night air. It will
never be friendly to you."

"What enemies we have all about us!" she returned with a slight shiver,
which Faber attributed to the enemy in question, and feared his care had
not amounted to precaution. "It is strange," she went on, "that all
things should conspire, or at least rise, against 'the roof and crown of
things,' as Tennyson cal