The two soon began to pass almost every evening together, pleasantly enough; for the reckless and rattling manner which Tom assumed with the mob, he laid aside with the curate, and showed himself as agreeable a companion as man could need; while Tom in his turn found that Headley was a rational and sweet-tempered man, who, even where he had made up his mind to differ, could hear an adverse opinion, put sometimes in a startling shape, without falling into any of those male hysterics of sacred horror, which are the usual refuge of ignorance and stupidity, terrified by what it cannot refute.  And soon Tom began to lay aside the reserve which he usually assumed to clergymen, and to tread on ground which Headley would gladly have avoided.  For, to tell the truth, ever since Tom had heard of Grace’s intended dismissal, the curate’s opinions had assumed a practical importance in his eyes; and he had vowed in secret that, if his cunning failed him not, turned out of her school she should not be.  Whether she had stolen his money or not, she had saved his life; and nobody should wrong her, if he could help it.  Besides, perhaps she had not his money.  The belt might have slipped off in the struggle; some one else might have taken it off in carrying him up; he might have mistaken the shame of innocence in her face for that of guilt.  Be it as it might, he had not the heart to make the matter public, and contented himself with staying at Aberalva, and watching for every hint of his lost treasure.

By which it befell that he was thinking, the half of every day at least, about Grace Harvey; and her face was seldom out of his mind’s eye; and the more he looked at it, either in fancy or in fact, the more did it fascinate him.  They met but rarely, and then interchanged the most simple and modest of salutations:  but Tom liked to meet her, would have gladly stopped to chat with her; however, whether from modesty or from a guilty conscience, she always hurried on in silence.

And she?  Tom’s request to her, through Willis, to say nothing about the matter, she had obeyed, as her mother also had done.  That Tom suspected her was a thought which never crossed her mind; to suspect any one herself was in her eyes a sin; and if the fancy that this man or that, among the sailors who had carried Tom up to Heale’s, might have been capable of the baseness, she thrust the thought from her, and prayed to be forgiven for her uncharitable judgment.

But night and day there weighed on that strange and delicate spirit the shame of the deed, as heavily, if possible, as if she herself had been the doer.  There was another soul in danger of perdition; another black spot of sin, making earth hideous to her.  The village was disgraced; not in the public eyes, true:  but in the eye of heaven, and in the eyes of that stranger for whom she was beginning to feel an interest more intense than she ever had done in any human being before.  Her saintliness (for