xton only
saw her preoccupied, moody, and silent.

"There is preaching again at Glanog to-night," she said a few days
afterwards; "I am not yet quite well enough to go. Do you choose to go,
Eleanor?"

Eleanor looked down and answered yes.

She went; and again, and again, and again. Sundays or week days,
Eleanor missed no chance of riding her pony to the little valley
church. Mrs. Caxton generally went with her, after the first week; but
going in her car she was no hindrance to the thoughtfulness and
solitude of the rides on horseback; and Eleanor sometimes wept all the
way home, and oftener came with a confused pain in her heart, dull or
acute as the case might be. She saw truth that seemed beautiful and
glorious to her; she saw it in the faces and lives as well as in the
words of others; she longed to share their immunity and the peace she
perceived them possessed of; but how to lay hold of it she could not
find. She seemed to herself too evil ever to become good; she tried,
but her heart seemed as hard as a stone. She prayed, but no relief
came. She did not see how she _could_ be saved, while evil had such a
hold of her; and to dislodge it she was powerless. Eleanor was in a
constant state of uneasiness and distress now. Her usually fine temper
was more easily roughened than she had ever known it; the services she
had long been accustomed to render to others who needed her, she felt
it now very hard to give. She was dissatisfied with herself and very
unhappy, and she said to herself that she was unfit to properly
minister to anybody else. She became a comparatively silent and
ungenial companion to her aunt. Mrs. Caxton perhaps understood her; for
she made no remark on this change, seemed to take no notice; was as
evenly and tenderly affectionate to her niece as ever before, with
perhaps a little added expression of sympathy now and then. She did not
even ask an explanation of Eleanor's manner of getting out of church.

Eleanor and her aunt, as it happened, always occupied a seat very near
the front and almost under the pulpit. It had been Eleanor's custom
ever since the first time she came there, to slip out of her seat and
make her way down the aisle with eager though quiet haste; leaving her
aunt to follow at her leisure; and she was generally mounted and off
before Mrs. Caxton reached the front door. During the service always
now, Eleanor's eyes were fastened upon the preacher; his often looked
at her; he reco