d look, of which all who knew him
knew the significance. He could not take orders.

Lady Beauchamp, at first utterly overwhelmed and dumfounded, stood
staring at him in blank silence. Then she icily uttered a few words. His
reasons,--might she ask?

They were many, Everett said. Even if no other hindrance existed, in his
own mind and opinions, his reverence for so sacred an office would not
permit him to embrace it as a mere matter of worldly advantage to
himself.

"Grant me patience, young man! Do you mean to tell me you would decline
this career because it promises to put an end to your difficulties? Are
you _quite_ a fool?" the lady burst out, astonishment and anger quite
startling her from all control.

"Bear with what may at first seem to you only folly," Everett answered
her, gently. "I don't think your calmer judgment can call it so. Would
you have me take upon myself obligations that I feel to be most solemn
and most vital, feeling myself unfitted, nay, unable, rightly to fulfil
them? Would you have me commit the treachery to God and man of swearing
that I felt called to that special service, when my heart protested
against my profession?"

"Romantic nonsense! A mere matter of modest scruples! You underrate
yourself, Everett. You are the very man for a clergyman, trust me."

But Everett went on to explain, that it was no question of
under-estimation of himself.

"You do not know, perhaps," he proceeded, while Lady Beauchamp, sorely
tried, tapped her fingers on the table, and her foot upon the
floor,--"you do not know, that, when I was a boy, and until two or three
years ago, my desire and ambition were to be a minister of the Church of
England."

"Well, Sir,--what has made you so much better, or so much worse, since
then, as to alter your opinion of the calling?"

"The reasons which made me abandon the idea three years since, and which
render it impossible for me to consider it now, have nothing to do with
my mental and moral worthiness or unworthiness. The fact is simply, I
cannot become a minister of a Church with many of whose doctrines I
cannot agree, and to which, indeed, I can no longer say I belong. In
your sense of the word, I am far from being a Churchman."

"Do you mean to say you have become a Dissenter?" cried Lady Beauchamp;
and, as if arrived at the climax of endurance, she stood transfixed,
regarding the young man with a species of sublime horror.

"Again, not in your sense of the te