her; and she was fain to take Stephen into
favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said,
as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True,
Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything
of the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of
her smallness in Knight's eyes still remained. Had the position been
reversed--had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing taste, and had
Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance to his ideal, it
would have engendered far happier thoughts. As matters stood, Stephen's
admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of passion.
Perhaps any keen man's judgment was condemnatory of her.

During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with
their seniors, and no conversation arose which was exclusively their
own. When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the
same subject. At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him
to speak so decisively as he had done; the next, that it was sterling
honesty.

'Ah, what a poor nobody I am!' she said, sighing. 'People like him, who
go about the great world, don't care in the least what I am like either
in mood or feature.'

Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman's mind in this manner,
is half way to her heart; the distance between those two stations is
proverbially short.

'And are you really going away this week?' said Mrs. Swancourt to Knight
on the following evening, which was Sunday.

They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a last
service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening
instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of the ruinous
portions.

'I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,' returned Knight; 'and
then I go on to Dublin.'

'Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,' said the vicar. 'A
week is nothing. We have hardly been able to realize your presence yet.
I remember a story which----'

The vicar suddenly stopped. He had forgotten it was Sunday, and would
probably have gone on in his week-day mode of thought had not a turn in
the breeze blown the skirt of his college gown within the range of his
vision, and so reminded him. He at once diverted the current of his
narrative with the dexterity the occasion demanded.

'The story of the Levite who journeyed to Bethlehem-judah, from which
I took my text the