itting in the Cathedral
when you came there with your sister and Miss Moorhouse--do you
remember? I heard Fanny call you by your name, and that brought to my
mind a young girl whom I had known in a slight way years before. And
the next day I again saw you there, at the service; I waited about the
entrance only to see you. I cared enough for you then to conceive a
design which for a long time seemed too hateful really to be carried
out, but--at last it was, you see.

Sidwell breathed quickly. Nothing he could have urged for himself would
have affected her more deeply than this. To date back and extend the
period of his love for her was a flattery more subtle than Peak
imagined.

'Why didn't you tell me that the day before yesterday?' she asked, with
tremulous bosom.

'I had no wish to remind myself of baseness in the midst of a pure joy.'

She was silent, then exclaimed, in accents of pain:

'Why should you have thought it necessary to be other than yourself?
Couldn't you see, at first meeting with us, that we were not bigoted
people? Didn't you know that Buckland had accustomed us to understand
how common it is nowadays for people to throw off the old religion?
Would father have looked coldly on you if he had known that you
followed where so many good and thoughtful men were leading?'

He regarded her anxiously.

'I had heard from Buckland that your father was strongly prejudiced;
that you also were quite out of sympathy with the new thought.'

'He exaggerated--even then.'

'Exaggerated? But on what plea could I have come to live in this
neighbourhood? How could I have kept you in sight--tried to win your
interest? I had no means, no position. The very thought of encouraging
my love for you demanded some extraordinary step. What course was open
to me?'

Sidwell let her head droop.

'I don't know. You might perhaps have discovered a way.'

'But what was the use, when the mere fact of my heresy would have
forbidden hope from the outset?'

'Why should it have done so?'

'Why? You know very well that you could never even have been friendly
with the man who wrote that thing in the review.'

'But here is the proof how much better it is to behave truthfully! In
this last year I have changed so much that I find it difficult to
understand the strength of my former prejudices. What is it to me now
that you speak scornfully of attempts to reconcile things that can't be
reconciled? I understand the new thought,