. She received
them most kindly, made Mrs. Faber lie on the sofa, covered her over, for
she was still trembling, and got her a glass of wine. But she could not
drink it, and lay sobbing in vain endeavor to control herself.

Meantime the clouds gathered thicker and thicker: the thunder-peal that
frightened the ponies had been but the herald of the storm, and now it
came on in earnest. The rain rushed suddenly on the earth, and as soon
as she heard it, Juliet ceased to sob. At every flash, however, although
she lay with her eyes shut, and her face pressed into the pillow, she
shivered and moaned.--"Why should one," thought Helen, "who is merely
and only the child of Nature, find herself so little at home with her?"
Presently Mr. Bevis came running in from the stable, drenched in
crossing to the house. As he passed to his room, he opened the door of
his wife's, and looked in.

"I am glad to see you safely housed, ladies," he said. "You must make
up your minds to stay where you are. It will not clear before the moon
rises, and that will be about midnight. I will send John to tell your
husbands that you are not cowering under a hedge, and will not be home
to-night."

He was a good weather-prophet. The rain went on. In the evening the two
husbands appeared, dripping. They had come on horseback together, and
would ride home again after dinner. The doctor would have to be out the
greater part of the Sunday, and would gladly leave his wife in such good
quarters; the curate would walk out to his preaching in the evening, and
drive home with Helen after it, taking Juliet, if she should be able to
accompany them.

After dinner, when the ladies had left them, between the two clergymen
and the doctor arose the conversation of which I will now give the
substance, leaving the commencement, and taking it up at an advanced
point.

"Now tell me," said Faber, in the tone of one satisfied he must be
allowed in the right, "which is the nobler--to serve your neighbor in
the hope of a future, believing in a God who will reward you, or to
serve him in the dark, obeying your conscience, with no other hope than
that those who come after you will be the better for you?"

"I allow most heartily," answered Wingfold, "and with all admiration,
that it is indeed grand in one hopeless for himself to live well for the
sake of generations to come, which he will never see, and which will
never hear of him. But I will not allow that there is any thin