es; and
city churches, too, at this date. The great tide of the evangelical
movement had, it is true, set steadily in, and was soon to cover the
kingdom with its healing and reviving waters; but its streams did not
penetrate into the heart of the hills, and small outlying villages went
on, with no schools and no resident clergymen, and were contented
because they were asleep.

Of course the sound of "the waters of Siloah" were heard in
Somersetshire as, one by one, Hannah More's schools grew and flourished,
and, one by one, her enemies became her friends. But the apathy at Fair
Acres on the part of the clergyman, and the determination of Mrs.
Falconer to set her face like a flint against all innovations, was
thought to be praiseworthy, and to show a laudable desire to resist
methodism in whatever form it took.

Gilbert Arundel's home-training had been very different from that of his
friend. His mother had early in life been brought in contact with
several of the fathers of the evangelical school, and the spirit had
quickened her faith into living heart service.

"How my mother would admire her!" Gilbert thought, as he carried away
with him from the church the picture, in his mind, of the squire's young
daughter, as she followed the Psalms in the big prayer-book on the desk,
and with her arm round Piers to steady him, pointed with her finger to
the words, reading the alternate verse with old Simkins, the clerk, in a
voice which Gilbert could barely catch, though he strained his ears to
do so.

There was an entire absence of self-consciousness in Joyce; and if the
undulations of the small mirror over her high chest of drawers,
permitted her to discern anything like the real reflection of her lovely
face, she did not give it much thought.

Brothers are not wont to admire their sisters or to tell them they are
fair to look upon, and Joyce would have been very much surprised if she
had heard that her brother Melville said, she only wanted the
accessories of fashionable dress to be accounted a belle at Bath or
Clifton, nay, even likely to make a sensation in the great world of
London life.

She was a hopeless rustic now, but he saw in her capabilities which few
girls possessed.

He had said nothing about Joyce's beauty to Mr. Arundel, because he was,
in his folly, ashamed to confess how devoid Joyce was of the ornaments
which went so far to form his own estimate of a woman, and Mr. Arundel's
silence about Joyce, sin