er it had been born with him, or through what storms of human
passion and suffering he had attained to this permanent central calm,
who could say? Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the
Master of Saint Bede's was a person, the depth of whose nature could
not be fathomed easily with any line. Possibly because, old as he was,
it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by
the right hand, had never been dropped yet.

As he sat, his grave eyes fixed on the ground, and his mouth covered by
the long thin brown hand--the sort of hand you see in mediaeval
portraits of student-gentlemen--nothing of him was discernible except
the gentleman and the student. Not though he sat waiting for his "two-
hours' wife," whom undoubtedly he had married for love--pure love--
the only reason for which anyone, man or woman, old or young, ought
to dare to marry. That he could feel as very few have the power to feel,
no one who was any judge of physiognomy could doubt for a moment;
yet he sat perfectly quiet--the quietness of a man accustomed to
something safer and higher than self-suppression--self-control. When
Mr. Ferguson came in, he rose and began to speak about the weather
and local topics as men do speak to one another--and better that they
should!--even at such crises as weddings or funerals.

And Christian his wife?

She had run up stairs--ran almost with her former light step, for her
heart felt lightened with the childish smile of little Oliver--to the attic
which for the last nine months she had occupied--the nursery, now
made into a bedroom, and tenanted by herself and the two little
Fergusons. No special sanctity of appropriation had it; a large,
somewhat bare room, in which not a thing was her own, either to miss
or leave behind. For, in truth, she had nothing of her own; the small
personalities which she had contrived to drag about with her from
lodging to lodging having all gone to pay debts, which she had insisted
--and Dr. Grey agreed--ought to be paid before she was married. So he
had taken from her the desk, the work-table, and the other valueless yet
well-prized feminine trifles, and brought her, as their equivalent, a sum
large enough to pay both these debts and all her marriage expenses,
which sum she, ignorant and unsuspicious, took gratefully, merely
saying "he was very kind."

She now looked round on her sole worldly possessions--the large trunk
which contained her or