usly. The church-wardens told him that, ever since he
came, the curate had done nothing but set the congregation by the ears;
and that he could not fail to receive as a weighty charge. But they told
him also that some of the principal dissenters declared him to be a
fountain of life in the place--and that seemed to him to involve the
worst accusation of all. For, without going so far as to hold, or even
say without meaning it, that dissenters ought to be burned, Mr. Bevis
regarded it as one of the first of merits, that a man should be a _good
churchman_.

CHAPTER IV.

THE RECTORY.

The curate had been in the study all the morning. Three times had his
wife softly turned the handle of his door, but finding it locked, had
re-turned the handle yet more softly, and departed noiselessly. Next
time she knocked--and he came to her pale-eyed, but his face almost
luminous, and a smile hovering about his lips: she knew then that either
a battle had been fought amongst the hills, and he had won, or a
thought-storm had been raging, through which at length had descended the
meek-eyed Peace. She looked in his face for a moment with silent
reverence, then offered her lips, took him by the hand, and, without a
word, led him down the stair to their mid-day meal. When that was over,
she made him lie down, and taking a novel, read him asleep. She woke him
to an early tea--not, however, after it, to return to his study: in the
drawing-room, beside his wife, he always got the germ of his
discourse--his germon, he called it--ready for its growth in the pulpit.
Now he lay on the couch, now rose and stood, now walked about the room,
now threw himself again on the couch; while, all the time his wife
played softly on her piano, extemporizing and interweaving, with an
invention, taste, and expression, of which before her marriage she had
been quite incapable.

The text in his mind was, "_Ye can not serve God and Mammon_." But not
once did he speak to his wife about it. He did not even tell her what
his text was. Long ago he had given her to understand that he could not
part with her as one of his congregation--could not therefore take her
into his sermon before he met her in her hearing phase in church, with
the rows of pews and faces betwixt him and her, making her once more one
of his flock, the same into whose heart he had so often agonized to pour
the words of rousing, of strength, of consolation.

On the Saturday, except his wif