t recurrence of great suffering; from loving
acceptance of the same, and hence an overflowing sympathy with every
form of humanity, even that more dimly revealed in the lower animals,
and especially suffering humanity; from deep acquaintance with the
motions of his own spirit, and the fullest conviction that one man is as
another; from the entire confidence of all who knew him, and the results
of his efforts to help them; above all, from persistently dwelling in
the secret place of the Most High, and thus entering into the hidden
things of life from the center whence the issues of them diverged--from
all these had been developed in him, through wisest use, an insight into
the natures of men, a power of reading the countenance, an apprehension
of what was moving in the mind, a contact, almost for the moment a
junction with the goings on of their spirits, which at times revealed to
him not only character, and prevailing purpose or drift of nature, but
even the main points of a past moral history. Sometimes indeed he would
recoil with terror from what seemed the threatened dawn in him of a
mysterious power, probably latent in every soul, of reading the future
of a person brought within certain points of spiritual range. What
startled him, however, may have been simply an involuntary conclusion,
instantaneously drawn, from the plain convergence of all the forces in
and upon the individual toward a point of final deliverance or of near
catastrophe: when "the mortal instruments" are steadily working for
evil, the only hope of deliverance lies in catastrophe.

When Polwarth had thus an opportunity of reading Juliet's countenance,
it was not wearing its usual expression: the ferment set at work in her
mind by the curate's sermon had intensified the strangeness of it, even
to something almost of definement; and it so arrested him that after the
ponies had darted away like birds, he stood for a whole minute in the
spot and posture in which they had left him.

"I never saw Polwarth look _distrait_ before," said the curate, and was
about to ask Juliet whether she had not been bewitching him, when the
far-away, miserable look of her checked him, and he dropped back into
his seat in silence.

But Polwarth had had no sudden insight into Juliet's condition; all he
had seen was, that she was strangely troubled--and that with no single
feeling; that there was an undecided contest in her spirit; that
something was required of her which