ubt or wonder.

"I have been over to see her," Eleanor repeated, "and she counsels me
to cut off my hair; cut it short."

"See you don't!" he said sententiously.

"Why?" said Eleanor.

"It would be the cause of our first and last quarrel."

"Our first," said Eleanor stifling some hidden amusement; "but how
could you tell that it would be the last?"

"It would be so very disagreeable!" Mr. Rhys said, with a gravity so
dryly comic that Eleanor's gravity was destroyed.

"Mrs. Balliol says I shall find it, my hair, I mean, very much in my
way."

"It would be in _my way_, if it was cut off."

"She says it will take a great deal of precious time. She thinks that
your razor would be better applied to my head."

"Than to what other object?"

"Than to its legitimate use and application. She wants me to get you to
let your beard grow, and to cut off my hair. 'It's unekal'--as Sam
Weller says."

Eleanor was laughing; she could not see Mr. Rhys's face very well; it
was somewhat bent over his papers; but the side view was of
unprovokable gravity. A gravity however which she had learned to know
covered a wealth of amusement or of mischief, as the case might be. She
knelt down to bring herself within better speaking and seeing distance.

"Rowland, what sort of people are your coadjutors?"

"They are the Lord's people," he answered.

Eleanor felt somewhat checked; the gravity of this answer was of a
different character; but she could not refrain from carrying the matter
further; she could not let it rest there.

"Do you mean," she said a little timidly, but persistently, "that you
are not willing to speak of them as they are, _to me?_"

He was quite silent half a minute, and Eleanor grew increasingly sober.
He said then, gently but decidedly,

"There are two persons in the field, of whose faults I am willing to
talk to you; yours and my own."

"And of others you think it is wrong, then, to speak even so privately
and kindly as we are speaking?" Eleanor was very much chagrined. Mr.
Rhys waited a moment, and then said, in the same manner,

"I cannot do it, Eleanor."

He got up a moment after and went out of the room. Eleanor felt almost
stunned with surprise and discomfort. This was the second time, in the
few days that she had been with him, that he had found her wrong in
something. It troubled her strangely; and the sense of how much he was
better than she--how much higher his sphere of living than the one sh