with
iron-grey hair seen in the mellow candlelight, really believed in the
terrible gospel of the morning; for she heard nothing of the academic
discourse that he was reading now, and presently her eyes wandered away
out of the windows to the pale night sky. There still glimmered a faint
streak of light in the west across the Market Square; it seemed to her as
a kind of mirror of her soul at this moment; the tender daylight had
faded, though she could still discern the token of its presence far away,
and as from behind the bars of a cage; but the night of God's wrath was
fast blotting out the last touch of radiance from her despairing soul.

Dr. Carrington looked at her with courteous anxiety, but with approval
too, as he held her hand for a moment as she said good-night to him.
There were shadows of weariness and depression under her eyes, and the
corners of her mouth drooped a little; and the doctor's heart stirred
with hope that the Word of God had reached at last this lamb of His who
had been fed too long on milk, and sheltered from the sun; but who was
now coming out, driven it might be, and unhappy, but still on its way to
the plain and wholesome pastures of the Word that lay in the glow of the
unveiled glory of God.

Isabel in her dark room upstairs was miserable; she stood long at her
window her face pressed against the glass, and looked at the sky, from
which the last streak of light had now died, and longed with all her
might for her own oak room at home, with her prie-dieu and the familiar
things about her; and the pines rustling outside in the sweet night-wind.
It seemed to her as if an irresistible hand had plucked her out from
those loved things and places, and that a penetrating eye were examining
every corner of her soul. In one sense she believed herself nearer to God
than ever before, but it was heartbreaking to find Him like this. She
went to sleep with the same sense of a burdening Presence resting on her
spirit.

The next morning Dr. Carrington saw her privately and explained to her a
notice that she had not understood when it had been given out in church
the day before. It was to the effect that the quarterly communion would
be administered on the following Sunday, having been transferred that
year from the Sunday after Michaelmas Day, and that she must hold herself
in readiness on the Wednesday afternoon to undergo the examination that
was enforced in every household in Northampton, at the hands