at means?"

Catharine's voice trembled, but she managed to read from her paper: "It
is strikingly after the manner of St. Paul. He opposes the two pictures
in him by the strongest words at his command--death and life. One _is_
death, the other _is_ life, and he prays to be delivered from death; not
the death of the body, but from death-in-life."

"Thank you; that is very nearly what I intended."

Mr. Cardew took tea at the Limes about once a fortnight with Mrs. Cardew.
The meal was served in the Misses Ponsonby's private room, and the girls
were invited in turn. About a fortnight after the examination on St.
Paul's theory of human nature, Mr. and Mrs. Cardew came as usual, and
Catharine was one of the selected guests. The company sat round the
table, and Mrs. Cardew was placed between her husband and Miss Furze. The
rector's wife was a fair-haired lady, with quiet, grey eyes, and regular,
but not strikingly beautiful, features. Yet they were attractive,
because they were harmonious, and betokened a certain inward agreement.
It was a sane, sensible face, but a careless critic might have thought
that it betokened an incapability of emotion, especially as Mrs. Cardew
had a habit of sitting back in her chair, and generally let the
conversation take its own course until it came very chose to her. She
had a sober mode of statement and criticism, which was never brilliant
and never stupid. It ought to have been most serviceable to her husband,
because it might have corrected the exaggeration into which his impulse,
talent, and power of pictorial representation were so apt to fall. She
had been brought up as an Evangelical, but she had passed through no
religious experiences whatever, and religion, in the sense in which
Evangelicalism in the Church of England of that day understood it, was
quite unintelligible to her. Had she been born a few years later she
would have taken to science, and would have done well at it, but at that
time there was no outlet for any womanly faculty, much larger in quantity
than we are apt to suppose, which has an appetite for exact facts.

Mr. Cardew would have been called a prig by those who did not know him
well. He had a trick of starting subjects suddenly, and he very often
made his friends very uncomfortable by the precipitate introduction,
without any warning, of remarks upon serious matters. Once even,
shocking to say, he quite unexpectedly at a tea-party made an observation
ab