He turned from the night in-doors.  Human hearts were his proper study.  The old house, he thought, slept with the rest.  One did not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow.  The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human life.  Yet life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and life-long.  The slow, enduring air suited this woman, Margaret Howth.  Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually:  one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the other, one love or one hate.  Whatever power was in the tide should be his, in its entirety.  It was his right.  Was not his aim high, the highest?  It was his right.

Margaret, looking up, saw the man’s intolerant eye fixed on her.  She met it coolly.  All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak, had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her apathy, her childish, dreamy quiet, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge of impatient contempt.  What did he want now with her?  Her duty was light; she took it up,—­she was glad to take it up; what more would he have?  She put the whole matter away from her.

It grew late.  She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her father, as usual.  Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in half-asleep; the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as he did everything else, intently.  It was an old story that she read,—­the story of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen hundred years ago.  Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air stopped in its course to listen.  Perhaps the simple story carried a deeper meaning to these brooding mountains and this solemn sky than to the purblind hearts within.  It was a dim, far-off story to them,—­very far off.  The old schoolmaster heard it with a lowered head, with the proud obedience with which a cavalier would receive his leader’s orders.  Was not the leader a knight, the knight of truest courage?  All that was high, chivalric in the old man sprang up to own him Lord.  That he not only preached to, but ate and drank with publicans and sinners, was a requirement of his mission; nowadays——.  Joel heard the “good word” with a bewildered consciousness of certain rules of honesty to be observed the next day, and a maze of crowns and harps shining somewhere beyond.  As for any immediate connection between the teachings of this book and “The Daily Gazette,” it was pure blasphemy to think of it.  The Lord held those old Jews in His hand, of course; but as for the election next month, that was quite another thing.  If Joel thrust the history out of the touch of common life, the Doctor brought it down, and held it there on trial.  To him it was the story of a Reformer who had served his day.