r to think of them. We will only think
about getting the house ready. We shall be as busy as bees. How we shall
want mother's clever fingers! I know the room upstairs that will just do
for Mr. Tryan's study. There shall be no seats in it except a very easy
chair and a very easy sofa, so that he shall be obliged to rest himself
when he comes home.'

Chapter 26

That was the last terrible crisis of temptation Janet had to pass
through. The goodwill of her neighbours, the helpful sympathy of the
friends who shared her religious feelings, the occupations suggested to
her by Mr. Tryan, concurred, with her strong spontaneous impulses towards
works of love and mercy, to fill up her days with quiet social
intercourse and charitable exertion. Besides, her constitution, naturally
healthy and strong, was every week tending, with the gathering force of
habit, to recover its equipoise, and set her free from those physical
solicitations which the smallest habitual vice always leaves behind it.
The prisoner feels where the iron has galled him, long after his fetters
have been loosed.

There were always neighbourly visits to be paid and received; and as the
months wore on, increasing familiarity with Janet's present self began to
efface, even from minds as rigid as Mrs. Phipps's, the unpleasant
impressions that had been left by recent years. Janet was recovering the
popularity which her beauty and sweetness of nature had won for her when
she was a girl; and popularity, as every one knows, is the most complex
and self-multiplying of echoes. Even anti-Tryanite prejudice could not
resist the fact that Janet Dempster was a changed woman--changed as the
dusty, bruised, and sun-withered plant is changed when the soft rains of
heaven have fallen on it--and that this change was due to Mr. Tryan's
influence. The last lingering sneers against the Evangelical curate began
to die out; and though much of the feeling that had prompted them
remained behind, there was an intimidating consciousness that the
expression of such feeling would not be effective--jokes of that sort had
ceased to tickle the Milby mind. Even Mr. Budd and Mr. Tomlinson, when
they saw Mr. Tryan passing pale and worn along the street, had a secret
sense that this man was somehow not that very natural and comprehensible
thing, a humbug--that, in fact, it was impossible to explain him from the
stomach and pocket point of view. Twist and stretch their theory as they
might