ical sweet tone, forgetting that such laughter was a sin.

And then that very clergyman himself would torment her;--he that told
her from the pulpit on Sundays how frightfully vain were all attempts
at worldly happiness. He would come to her on the Monday with a
good-natured, rather rubicund face, and would ask after all her
little worldly belongings,--for he knew of her history and her
means,--and he would joke with her, and tell her comfortably of his
grown sons and daughters, who were prospering in worldly matters,
and express the fondest solicitude as to their worldly advancement.
Twice or thrice a year Mrs. Ray would go to the parsonage, and such
evenings would be by no means hours of wailing. Tea and buttered
toast on such occasions would be very manifestly in the ascendant.
Mrs. Ray never questioned the propriety of her clergyman's life, nor
taught herself to see a discrepancy between his doctrine and his
conduct. But she believed in both, and was unconsciously troubled
at having her belief so varied. She never thought about it, or
discovered that her friend allowed himself to be carried away in his
sermons by his zeal, and that he condemned this world in all things,
hoping that he might thereby teach his hearers to condemn it in
some things. Mrs. Ray would allow herself the privilege of no such
argument as that. It was all gospel to her. The parson in the church,
and the parson out of the church, were alike gospels to her sweet,
white, credulous mind; but these differing gospels troubled her and
tormented her.

Of that particular clergyman, I may as well here say that he was the
Rev. Charles Comfort, and that he was rector of Cawston, a parish in
Devonshire, about two miles out of Baslehurst. Mr. Prime had for a
year or two been his curate, and during that term of curacy he had
married Dorothea Ray. Then he had died, and his widow had returned
from the house her husband had occupied near the church to her
mother's cottage. Mr. Prime had been possessed of some property, and
when he died he left his widow in the uncontrolled possession of
two hundred a year. As it was well known that Mrs. Ray's income was
considerably less than this, the people of Baslehurst and Cawston
had declared how comfortable for Mrs. Ray would be this accession of
wealth to the family. But Mrs. Ray had not become much the richer.
Mrs. Prime did no doubt pay her fair quota towards the maintenance
of the humble cottage at Bragg's End, for s