their return. They hurried at first, for the afternoon had worn away.
The rain drops lay thick and sparkling on every blade of grass, and
dripped upon them from the trees.

"Now you will get your feet wet again," said Julia; "and then you will
have another sickness; and Mr. Carlisle will be angry."

"Do let Mr. Carlisle's anger alone!" said Eleanor. "I shall not sit
down in wet shoes, so I shall not get hurt. Did you ever see him angry?"

"No," said Julia; "and I am glad he won't be angry with me?"

In spite of her words, the wet grass gave Eleanor a disagreeable
reminder of what wet grass had done for her some months before. The
remembrance of her sickness came up with the immediate possibility of
its returning again; the little feeling of danger and exposure gave
power to the things she had just heard. She could not banish them; she
recalled freshly the miserable fear and longing of those days when she
lay ill and knew not how her illness would turn; the fearful want of a
shelter; the comparative littleness of all things under the sun.
Rythdale Priory had not been worth a feather in that day; all the gay
pleasures and hopes of the summer could have found no entrance into her
heart then. And as she was then, so Eleanor knew herself
now--defenceless, if danger came. And the wet grass into which every
footstep plunged said that danger might be at any time very near.
Eleanor wished bitterly that she had not come this walk with Julia. It
was strange, how utterly shaken, miserable, forlorn, her innermost
spirit felt, at this possible approach of evil to her shelterless head.
And with double force, though they had been forcible at the time, Mr.
Rhys's words recurred to her--the words that he had spoken half to
himself as it were--"Hope thou in God." Eleanor had heard those words,
read by different lips, at different times; they were not new; but the
meaning of them had never struck her before. Now for the first time, as
she heard the low, sweet, confident utterance of a soul fleeing to its
stronghold, of a spirit absolutely secure there, she had an idea of
what "hope in God" meant; and every time she remembered the tones of
those words, spoken by failing lips too, it gave a blow to her heart.
There was something she wanted. What else could be precious like that?
And with them belonged in this instance, Eleanor felt, a purity of
character till now unimagined. Thoughts and footsteps hurrying along
together, they were past