her?  And his image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as it was in the beauty and glory of all that he had seen, and done, and suffered.  Oh Love, Love, Love, the same in peasant and in peer!  The more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world which is common to peasant and to peer.  They say that you are blind; a dreamer, an exaggerator—­a liar, in short.  They know just nothing about you, then.  You will not see people as they seem, and as they have become, no doubt:  but why? because you see them as they ought to be, and are, in some deep way, eternally, in the sight of Him who conceived and created them.

At last she started, as if waking from a pleasant dream, and spoke, half to herself—­

“Oh, how foolish of me—­to be idling away this opportunity; the only one, perhaps, which I may have!  Oh, Mr. Thurnall, tell me about this cholera!”

“What about it?”

“Everything.  Ever since I heard of what you have been saying to the people, ever since Mr. Headley’s sermon, it has been like fire in my ears!”

“I am truly glad to hear it.  If all parsons had preached about it for the last fifteen years as Mr. Headley did last Sunday, if they had told people plainly that, if the cholera was God’s judgment at all, it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera would be impossible in England by now.”

“Oh, Mr. Thurnall:  but is it not God’s doing? and can we stop His hand?”

“I know nothing about that, Miss Harvey.  I only know that wheresoever cholera breaks out, it is some one’s fault; and if deaths occur, some one ought to be tried for manslaughter—­I had almost said murder, and transported for life.”

“Someone?  Who?”

“That will be settled in the next generation, when men have common sense enough to make laws for the preservation of their own lives, against the dirt, and covetousness, and idleness, of a set of human hogs.”

Grace was silent for awhile.

“But can nothing be done to keep it off now?  Must it come?”

“I believe it must.  Still one may do enough to save many lives in the meanwhile.”

“Enough to save many lives—­lives?—­immortal souls, too!  Oh, what could I do?”

“A great deal, Miss Harvey,” said Tom, across whom the recollection of Grace’s influence flashed for the first time.  What a help she might be to him!

And he talked on and on to her, and found that she entered into his plans with all her wild enthusiasm, but also with sound practical common sense; and Tom began to respect her intellect as well as her heart.

At last, however, she faltered—­

“Oh, if I could but believe all this!  Is it not fighting against God?”