sat pondering for a minute, and then--

"You set me on a task for which I am as little fit as any man, by your
own showing. What do I know of disagreements between man and wife? And
one has a delicacy about offering her comfort. She must bestow her
confidence on me before I can use it: while he--"

"While he, as the cause of the disease, is what you ought to treat;
and not her unhappiness, which is only a symptom of it."

"Spoken like a wise doctor; but to tell you the truth, Thurnall, I
have no influence over Mr. Vavasour, and see no means of getting any.
If he recognised my authority, as his parish priest, then I should see
my way. Let him be as bad as he might, I should have a fixed point
from which to work; but with his free-thinking notions, I know
well--one can judge it too easily from his poems--he would look on me
as a pedant assuming a spiritual tyranny to which I have no claim."

Tom sat awhile nursing his knee, and then--

"If you saw a man fallen into the water, what do you think would be
the shortest way to prove to him that you had authority from heaven
to pull him out? Do you give it up? Pulling him out would it not be,
without more ado?"

"I should be happy enough to pull poor Vavasour out, if he would let
me. But till he believes that I can do it, how can I even begin!"

"How can you expect him to believe, if he has no proof?"

"There are proofs enough in the Bible and elsewhere, if he will but
accept them. If he refuses to examine into the credentials, the fault
is his, not mine. I really do not wish to be hard; but would not you
do the same, if any one refused to employ you, because he chose to
deny that you were a legally qualified practitioner?"

"Not so badly put; but what should I do in that case? Go on quietly
curing his neighbours, till he began to alter his mind as to my
qualifications, and came in to be cured himself. But here's this
difference between you and me. I am not bound to attend to any one who
don't send for me; while you think that you are, and carry the notion
a little too far, for I expect you to kill yourself by it some day."

"Well?" said Frank, with something of that lazy Oxford tone, which is
intended to save the speaker the trouble of giving his arguments, when
he has already made up his mind, or thinks that he has so done.

"Well, if I thought myself bound to doctor the man, willy-nilly, as
you do, I would certainly go to him, and show him, at least, that I
unde