The enduring air suited
this woman, Margret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with
sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually:
one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to
the other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should
be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his aim high, the
highest? It was his right.

Margret, looking up, saw the man's eye fixed on her. She met it
coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak,
had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her childish,
dreamy apathy, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge of
contempt. What did he want now with her? Her duty was light; she took
it up,--she was glad to take it up; what more would he have? She put
the whole matter away from her.

It grew late. She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her
father, as usual. Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in
half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as
he did everything else, intently. It was an old story that she
read,--the story of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of
Galilee eighteen hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain,
fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the
slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple
story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and solemn
sky than to the purblind hearts within. It was a far-off story to
them,--very far off. The old school-master heard it with a lowered
head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his
leader's orders. Was not the leader a knights the knight of truest
courage? All that was high, chivalric in the old man sprang up to own
him Lord. That he not only preached to, but ate and drank with
publicans and sinners, was a requirement of his mission; nowadays----.
Joel heard the "good word" with a bewildered consciousness of certain
rules of honesty to be observed next day, and a maze of crowns and
harps shining somewhere beyond. As for any immediate connection
between the teachings of this book and "The Daily Gazette," it was pure
blasphemy to think of it. The Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of
course; but as for the election next month, that was quite another
thing. If Joel thrust the history out of the touch of common life, the
Doctor brought it down, and