rable about him.'

Mr. Tryan saw it all in a moment--he saw that it had all been done for
his sake. He could not be sorry; he could not say no; he could not resist
the sense that life had a new sweetness for him, and that he should like
it to be prolonged a little--only a little, for the sake of feeling a
stronger security about Janet. When she had finished speaking, she looked
at him with a doubtful, inquiring glance. He was not looking at her; his
eyes were cast downwards; but the expression of his face encouraged her,
and she said, in a half-playful tone of entreaty,--'You _will_ go and
live with her? I know you will. You will come back with me now and see
the house.'

He looked at her then, and smiled. There is an unspeakable blending of
sadness and sweetness in the smile of a face sharpened and paled by slow
consumption. That smile of Mr. Tryan's pierced poor Janet's heart: she
felt in it at once the assurance of grateful affection and the prophecy
of coming death. Her tears rose; they turned round without speaking, and
went back again along the lane.

Chapter 27

In less than a week Mr. Tryan was settled at Holly Mount, and there was
not one of his many attached hearers who did not sincerely rejoice at the
event.

The autumn that year was bright and warm, and at the beginning of
October, Mr. Walsh, the new curate, came. The mild weather, the
relaxation from excessive work, and perhaps another benignant influence,
had for a few weeks a visibly favourable effect on Mr. Tryan. At least he
began to feel new hopes, which sometimes took the guise of new strength.
He thought of the cases in which consumption patients remain nearly
stationary for years, without suffering so as to make their life
burdensome to themselves or to others; and he began to struggle with a
longing that it might be so with him. He struggled with it, because he
felt it to be an indication that earthly affection was beginning to have
too strong a hold on him, and he prayed earnestly for more perfect
submission, and for a more absorbing delight in the Divine Presence as
the chief good. He was conscious that he did not wish for prolonged life
solely that he might reclaim the wanderers and sustain the feeble: he was
conscious of a new yearning for those pure human joys which he had
voluntarily and determinedly banished from his life--for a draught of
that deep affection from which he had been cut off by a dark chasm of
remorse. For now, t