scandal,--this person from
nowhere, this niece of a German teacher, carrying off the wealthiest
young man in the county. The ways of so-called Providence were quite
criminally inscrutable, she thought, in stark defiance of what a
vicar's wife should think; but then she was greatly goaded.

Priscilla herself came out of Mrs. Jones's door at that moment with a
very happy face. She had succeeded in comforting the sick woman to an
extent that surprised her. The sick woman had cheered up so suddenly
and so much that Priscilla, delighted, had at once concluded that work
among the sick poor was her true vocation. And how easy it had been! A
few smiles, a few kind words, a five-pound note put gently into the
withered old hands, and behold the thing was done. Never was sick
woman so much comforted as Mrs. Jones. She who had been disinclined to
speak above a whisper when Priscilla went in was able at the end of
the visit to pour forth conversation in streams, and quite loud
conversation, and even interspersed with chuckles. All Friday
Priscilla had tried to help in the arranging of her cottage, and had
made herself and Fritzing so tired over it that on Saturday she let
him go up alone and decided that she would, for her part, now begin to
do good to the people in the village. It was what she intended to do
in future. It was to be the chief work of her new life. She was going
to live like the poor and among them, smooth away their sorrows and
increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the
rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the
clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary
facts of life. And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the
farm. It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead
that sillinesses assailed her soul--shrinkings of the flesh from
honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience at Annalise's
swollen eyes. Priscilla could have cried that night when she went to
bed, if she had not held tears in scorn, at the sickliness of her
spirit, her spirit that she had thought more than able to keep her
body in subjection, that she had hoped was unalterably firm and brave.
But see the uses of foolishness,--the reaction from it is so great
that it sends us with a bound twice as far again along the right road
as we were while we were wise and picking our way with clean shoes
slowly among the puddles. Who does not know that fresh impuls