Juliet had soon almost as much teaching as she could manage.  People liked her, and children came to love her a little.  A good report of her spread.  The work was hard, chiefly because it included more walking than she had been accustomed to; but Dorothy generally walked with her, and to the places furthest off, Helen frequently took her with her ponies, and she got through the day’s work pretty well.  The fees were small, but they sufficed, and made life a little easier to her host and his family.  Amanda got very fond of her, and, without pretending to teach her, Juliet taught her a good deal.  On Sundays she went to church; and Dorothy, although it cost her a struggle to face the imputation of resentment, by which the chapel-people would necessarily interpret the change, went regularly with her, in the growing hope of receiving light from the curate.  Her father also not unfrequently accompanied her.

CHAPTER XXII.

TWO MINDS.

All this time poor Faber, to his offer of himself to Juliet, had received no answer but a swoon—­or something very near it.  Every attempt he made to see her alone at the rectory had been foiled; and he almost came to the conclusion that the curate and his wife had set themselves to prejudice against himself a mind already prejudiced against his principles.  It added to his uneasiness that, as he soon discovered, she went regularly to church.  He knew the power and persuasion of Wingfold, and looked upon his influence as antagonistic to his hopes.  Pride, anger, and fear were all at work in him; but he went on calling, and did his best to preserve an untroubled demeanor.  Juliet imagined no change in his feelings, and her behavior to him was not such as to prevent them from deepening still.

Every time he went it was with a desperate resolution of laying his hand on the veil in which she had wrapped herself, but every time he found it impossible, for one reason or another, to make a single movement toward withdrawing it.  Again and again he tried to write to her, but the haunting suspicion that she would lay his epistle before her new friends, always made him throw down his pen in a smothering indignation.  He found himself compelled to wait what opportunity chance or change might afford him.

When he learned that she had gone to live with the Drakes, it was a relief to him; for although he knew the minister was far more personal in his hostility than Wingfold, he was confident his influence over her would not be so great; and now he would have a better chance, he thought, of seeing her alone.  Meantime he took satisfaction in knowing that he did not neglect a single patient, and that in no case had he been less successful either as to diagnosis or treatment because of his trouble.  He pitied himself just a little as a martyr to the truth, a martyr the more meritorious that the truth to which he sacrificed himself gave him no hope for the future, and for the