longer."

"Well, dear, if I were you I would not have waited at all, or else
waited till your wife came home."

"Ah, dame, that is all very well for you to say. You could live on
hearing of sermons and smelling to rosebuds. You don't know what 't is
to be a hungry man."

The next Sunday he sat sadly down, and finished his dinner without her.
And she came home and sat down to half-empty dishes; and ate much less
than she used when she had him to keep her company in it.

Griffith, looking on disconsolate, told her she was more like a bird
pecking than a Christian eating of a Sunday.

"No matter, child," said she; "so long as my soul is filled with the
bread of Heaven."

Leonard's eloquence suffered no diminution, either in quantity or
quality; and, after a while, Gaunt gave up his rule of never dining
abroad on the Sunday. If his wife was not punctual, his stomach was; and
he had not the same temptation to dine at home he used to have.

And indeed, by degrees, instead of quietly enjoying his wife's company
on that sweet day, he got to see less of her than on the week-days.

CHAPTER XVI.

Your mechanical preacher flings his words out happy-go-lucky; but the
pulpit orator, like every other orator, feels his people's pulse as he
speaks, and vibrates with them, and they with him.

So Leonard soon discovered he had a great listener in Mrs. Gaunt: she
was always there whenever he preached, and her rapt attention never
flagged. Her gray eyes never left his face, and, being upturned, the
full orbs came out in all their grandeur, and seemed an angel's, come
down from heaven to hear him: for, indeed, to a very dark man, as
Leonard was, the gentle radiance of a true Saxon beauty seems always
more or less angelic.

By degrees this face became a help to the orator. In preaching he looked
sometimes to it for sympathy, and lo, it was sure to be melting with
sympathy. Was he led on to higher or deeper thoughts than most of his
congregation could understand, he looked to this face to understand him;
and lo, it had quite understood him, and was beaming with intelligence.

From a help and an encouragement it became a comfort and a delight to
him.

On leaving the pulpit and cooling, he remembered its owner was no angel,
but a woman of the world, and had put him frivolous questions.

The illusion, however, was so beautiful, that Leonard, being an
imaginative man, was unwilling to dispel it by coming into familiar
contact w