ctical experience of hers among the poor and
suffering, for the sake of which he would in an instant scornfully fling
out of sight all his own magnificent plannings. Never had she told so
much of her own life to any one; her consciousness of it sometimes
filled her with a sort of terror, lest she might have been trading, as
it were, for her own advantage on the sacred things of God. But he would
have it. His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew
the stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes would soften!
With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-bye!

And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as
he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she
could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the
juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even
picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author
of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank
from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his
future relations towards a personality so marked, and so important to
every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here all was
plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or
her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.

But it was when he turned to larger things--to books, movements, leaders
of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed. Why would
he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established order in
the person of Mr. Grey? Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he
talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to
be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right belief
were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation?
When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn
silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome
speech and his clergyman's dress.

And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own. He was
merely talking the natural Christian language of this generation;
whereas she, the child of a mystic--solitary, intense, and deeply
reflective from her earliest youth--was still thinking and speaking in
the language of her father's generation.

But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near to these
points of jarring, he would hu