ed brain could not
break. She had once begged Phebe, if she grew really delirious, to
dismiss all other attendants, so that no ear but hers might hear her
wanderings; but this emergency had not arisen. And since then she had
sunk more and more into a stern silence.

Felix had left home, and entered into his lodgings, taking his father's
portrait with him. He was not so far from home but that he either
visited it, or received visitors from it almost every day. His mother's
illness troubled him; or otherwise the change in his life, his first
step in independent manhood, would have been one of great happiness to
him. He did not feel any deep misgivings as to Alice, and the
blessedness of the future with her; and in the mean-time, while he was
waiting, there was his work to do.

He had taken orders, not from ambition or any hope of worldly gain,
those lay quite apart from the path he had chosen, but from the simple
desire of fighting as best he might against the growing vices and
miseries of civilization. Step for step with the ever-increasing luxury
of the rich he saw marching beside it the gaunt degradation of the poor.
The life of refined self-indulgence in the one class was caricatured by
loathsome self-indulgence in the other. On the one hand he saw, young as
he was, something of the languor and weariness of life of those who have
nothing to do, and from satiety have little to hope or to fear; and on
the other the ignorance and want which deprived both mind and body of
all healthful activity, and in the pressure of utter need left but
little scope for hope or fear. He fancied that such civilization sank
its victims into deeper depths of misery than those of barbarism.

Before him seemed to lie a huge, weltering mass of slime, a very
quagmire of foulness and miasma, in the depths and darkness of which he
could dimly discern the innumerable coils of a deadly dragon, breathing
forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and
himself must breathe, and crushing in its pestilential folds the bodies
and souls of immortal men. He was one of the young St. Michaels called
by God to give combat to that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan,
which was deceiving the old world.

CHAPTER V.

A LONDON CURACY.

The district on which his vicar directed Felix to concentrate his
efforts was by no means a neglected one. It was rather suffering from
the multitude of laborers, who had chosen it as their pa