But the moment the party left the school, Grace dropped into her chair; her head fell on the table, and she burst into an agony of weeping, which brought the whole school round her.

“Oh, my darlings! my darlings!” cried she at last, looking up, and clasping them to her by twos and threes; “Is there no way of saving you?  No way!  Then we must make the more haste to be good, and be all ready when Jesus comes to take us.”  And shaking off her passion with one strong effort, she began teaching those children as she had never taught them before, with a voice, a look, as of Stephen himself when he saw the heavens opened.

For that burst of weeping was the one single overflow of long pent passion, disappointment, and shame.

She had tried, indeed.  Ever since Tom’s conversation and Frank’s sermon had poured in a flood of new light on the meaning of epidemics, and bodily misery, and death itself, she had been working as only she could work; exhorting, explaining, coaxing, warning, entreating with tears, offering to perform with her own hands the most sickening offices; to become, if no one else would, the common scavenger of the town.  There was no depth to which, in her noble enthusiasm, she would not have gone down.  And behold, it had been utterly in vain!  Ah! the bitter disappointment of finding her influence fail her utterly, the first time that it was required for a great practical work!  They would let her talk to them about their souls, then!—­They would even amend a few sins here and there, of which they had been all along as well aware as she.  But to be convinced of a new sin; to have their laziness, pride, covetousness, touched; that, she found, was what they would not bear; and where she had expected, if not thanks, at least a fair hearing, she had been met with peevishness, ridicule, even anger and insult.

Her mother had turned against her.  “Why would she go getting a bad name from every one, and driving away customers?” The preachers, who were (as is too common in West-country villages) narrow, ignorant, and somewhat unscrupulous men, turned against her.  They had considered the cholera, if it was to come, as so much spiritual capital for themselves; an occasion which they could “improve” into a sensation, perhaps a “revival;” and to explain it upon mere physical causes was to rob them of their harvest.  Coarse viragos went even farther still, and dared to ask her “whether it was the curate or the doctor she was setting her cap at:  for she never had anything in her mouth now but what they had said?” And those words went through her heart like a sword.  Was she disinterested?  Was not love for Thurnall, the wish to please him, mingling with all her earnestness?  And again, was not self-love mingling with it? and mingling, too, with the disappointment, even indignation, which she felt at having failed?  Ah—­what hitherto hidden spots of self-conceit, vanity, pharisaic pride, that bitter trial laid bare, or seemed to lay, till she learned to thank her unseen Guide even for it!