So Grace’s sayings were quoted against him.  Her power was formidable enough, if she dare use it.  He was silent awhile, and then—­

“Do you think she has heard of this—­of my—­”

“Honesty’s the best policy, sir:  she has; and that’s the truth.  You know how things get round.”

“Well; and what did she say?”

“I’ll tell you her very words, sir; and they were these, if you’ll excuse me.  ‘Poor dear gentleman,’ says she, ’if he thinks chapel-going so wrong, why does he dare drive folks to chapel?  I wonder, every time he looks at that deep sea, he don’t remember what the Lord said about it, and those who cause his little ones to offend.’”

Frank was somewhat awed.  The thought was new; the application of the text, as his own scholarship taught him, even more exact than Grace had fancied.

“Then she was not angry?”

“She, sir!  You couldn’t anger her if you tore her in pieces with hot pincers, as they did those old martyrs she’s always telling about.”

“Good-bye, Willis,” said Frank, in a hopeless tone of voice, and sauntered to the pier-end, down the steps, and along the lower pier-way, burdened with many thoughts.  He came up to the knot of chatting sailors.  Not one of them touched his cap, or moved out of the way for him.  The boat lay almost across the whole pier-way; and he stopped, awkwardly enough, for there was not room to get by.

“Will you be so kind as to let me pass?” asked he, meekly enough.  But no one stirred.

“Why don’t you get up, Tom?” asked one.

“I be lame.”

“So be I.”

“The gentleman can step over me, if he likes,” said big Jan; a proposition the impossibility whereof raised a horse-laugh.

“Ain’t you ashamed of yourselves, lads?” said the severe voice of Willis, from above.  The men rose sulkily; and Frank hastened on, as ready to cry as ever he had been in his life.  Poor fellow! he had been labouring among these people for now twelve months, as no man had ever laboured before, and he felt that he had not won the confidence of a single human being,—­not even of the old women, who took his teaching for the sake of his charity, and who scented popery, all the while, in words in which there was no popery, and in doctrines which were just the same, on the whole, as those of the dissenting preacher, simply because he would sprinkle among them certain words and phrases which had become “suspect,” as party badges.  His church was all but empty; the general excuse was, that it was a mile from the town:  but Frank knew that that was not the true reason; that all the parish had got it into their heads that he had a leaning to popery; that he was going over to Rome; that he was probably a Jesuit in disguise.