d perhaps by
conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother
as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it
was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might
sometimes openly rebel against her mother's domination, as my wife and I
had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately
submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different
sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her
in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice
where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her
more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of
man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have
given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and
joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and
sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific
pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any
effort to mask.

When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn
in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He
asked me questions--whether I had noticed this thing or that about her,
or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to
compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had
undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.

XIII.

Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study,
or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself
on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the
haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and
then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This
part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the
mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a
climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the
rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown
into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory
one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the
study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country,
as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as
I h