s pulled at its nest in the fibers of her heart?

The curate and his wife talked softly all the way back to the house.

"Do you really think," said Helen, "that every fault one has ever
committed will one day be trumpeted out to the universe?"

"That were hardly worth the while of the universe," answered her
husband. "Such an age-long howling of evil stupidities would be enough
to turn its brain with ennui and disgust. Nevertheless, the hypocrite
will certainly know himself discovered and shamed, and unable any longer
to hide himself from his neighbor. His past deeds also will be made
plain to all who, for further ends of rectification, require to know
them. Shame will then, I trust, be the first approach of his
redemption."

Juliet, for she was close behind them, heard his words and shuddered.

"You are feeling it cold, Mrs. Faber," said the rector, and, with the
fatherly familiarity of an old man, drew her cloak better around her.

"It is not cold," she faltered; "but somehow the night-air always makes
me shiver."

The rector pulled a muffler from his coat-pocket, and laid it like a
scarf on her shoulders.

"How kind you are!" she murmured. "I don't deserve it."

"Who deserves any thing?" said the rector. "I less, I am sure, than any
one I know. Only, if you will believe my curate, you have but to ask,
and have what you need."

"I wasn't the first to say that, sir," Wingfold struck in, turning his
head over his shoulder.

"I know that, my boy," answered Mr. Bevis; "but you were the first to
make me want to find its true.--I say, Mrs. Faber, what if it should
turn out after all, that there was a grand treasure hid in your field
and mine, that we never got the good of because we didn't believe it was
there and dig for it? What if this scatter-brained curate of mine should
be right when he talks so strangely about our living in the midst of
calling voices, cleansing fires, baptizing dews, and _won't_ hearken,
won't be clean, won't give up our sleep and our dreams for the very
bliss for which we cry out in them!"

The old man had stopped, taken off his hat, and turned toward her. He
spoke with such a strange solemnity of voice that it could hardly have
been believed his by those who knew him as a judge of horses and not as
a reader of prayers. The other pair had stopped also.

"I should call it very hard," returned Juliet, "to come so near it and
yet miss it."

"Especially to be driven so near it against