time my
heart is bleeding for her. There it is!" he exclaimed, suddenly hiding
his face in his hands. "This is what crushes one to think of. The rest
is hard enough, Heaven knows--separation from my friends, giving up my
own people, wounding and grieving, as I know I shall, everybody who
loves me. I could bear that; but Louisa and her children--God help me,
there's the sting!"

They were both men, and strong men, not likely to fall into any
sentimental weakness; but something between a groan and a sob, wrung
out of the heart of the elder brother at the thought of the terrible
sacrifice before him, echoed with a hard sound of anguish into the
quiet. It was very different from his wife's trembling, weeping,
hoping agony; but it reduced the Curate more than ever to that
position of spectator which he felt was so very far from the active
part which his poor sister expected of him.

"I don't know by what steps you have reached this conclusion," said
Frank Wentworth; "but even if you feel it your duty to give up the
Anglican Church (in which, of course, I think you totally wrong,"
added the High Churchman in a parenthesis), "I cannot see why you are
bound to abandon all duties whatever. I have not come to argue with
you; I daresay poor Louisa may expect it of me, but I can't, and you
know very well I can't. I should like to know how it has come about
all the same; but one thing only, Gerald--a man may be a Christian
without being a priest. Louisa--"

"Hush, I am a priest, or nothing. I can't relinquish my life!" cried the
elder brother, lifting his hands suddenly, as if to thrust away
something which threatened him. Then he rose up again and went towards
the window and his cedar, which stood dark in the sunshine, slightly
fluttered at its extremities by the light summer-wind, but throwing
glorious level lines of shadow, which the wind could not disturb, upon
the grass. The limes near, and that one delicate feathery birch which
was Mrs Wentworth's pride, had all some interest of their own on hand,
and went on waving, rustling, coquetting with the breezes and the
sunshine in a way which precluded any arbitrary line of shade. But the
cedar stood immovable, like a verdant monument, sweeping its long level
branches over the lawn, passive under the light, and indifferent, except
at its very tops and edges, to the breeze. If there had been any human
sentiment in that spectator of the ways of man, how it must have groaned
and tre