big old roots of trees covered
with the close glittering green foliage and dark blue clusters of the
dewberry, with the hum of bees filling the air, the twittering of the
birds, the sound of the church bells--nothing more like the heart of
summer, more peaceful, genial, happy than that brooding calm of nature
amid all the harmonious sounds, could be.

But as Elinor put this impatient question, her countenance all ablaze
with anger and vehemence and resolution, yet with a gleam of anxiety in
the puckers of her forehead and the eyes which shone from beneath them,
they stepped out upon the road by which other groups were passing, all
bound towards the centre of the church and its tinkling bells. Elinor
stopped, and drew a longer panting breath, and gave him a look of
fierce reproach, as if this too were his fault: and then she smoothed
her ruffled plumes, after the manner of women, and replied to the
Sunday-morning salutations, with the smiles and nods of use and wont.
She knew everybody, both the rich and the poor, or rather I should say
the well-off and the less-well-off, for there were neither rich nor
poor, formally speaking, on Windyhill. John did not find it so easy to
put his emotions in his pocket. He cast an admiring glance upon her as
with heightened colour and a little panting of the breath, but no other
sign of disturbance, she made her inquiries after this one's mother and
that one's child. It was wonderful to him to see how the storm was got
under in a moment. An occasional glance aside at himself from the corner
of her eye, a sort of dart of defiance as if to bid him remember that
she was not done with him, was shot at John from time to time over the
heads of the innocent country people in whom she pretended to be so much
interested. Pretended!--was it pretence, or was the one as real as the
other? He heard her promising to come to-morrow to see an invalid, to
send certain articles as soon as she got home, to look up certain books.
Would she do so? or was all this a mere veil to cover the other which
engaged all her soul?

And then there came the service--that soothing routine of familiar
prayers, which the lips of men and women absorbed in the violence and
urgency of life murmur over almost without knowing, with now and then an
awakening to something that touches their own aspirations, to something
that offers or that asks for help. "Because there is none other that
fighteth for us but only Thou, O God."