In the meantime the chapel in the park at Nestley had been advancing, for the rector, who was by nature no dawdler where he was interested, had been pushing it on; and at length on a certain Sunday evening in the autumn, the people of the neighborhood having been invited to attend, the rector read prayers in it, and the curate preached a sermon.  At the close of the service the congregation was informed that prayers would be read there every Sunday evening, and that was all.  Mrs. Bevis, honest soul, the green-mantled pool of whose being might well desire a wind, if only from a pair of bellows, to disturb its repose, for not a fish moved to that end in its sunless deeps—­I say deeps, for such there must have been, although neither she nor her friends were acquainted with any thing there but shallows—­was the only one inclined to grumble at the total absence of ceremonial pomp:  she did want her husband to have the credit of the great deed.

About the same time it was that Juliet again sought the cottage at Owlkirk, with the full consciousness that she went there to meet her fate.  Faber came to see her every day, and both Ruber and Niger began to grow skinny.  But I have already said enough to show the nature and course of the stream, and am not bound to linger longer over its noise among the pebbles.  Some things are interesting rather for their results than their process, and of such I confess it is to me the love-making of these two.—­“What! were they not human?” Yes:  but with a truncated humanity—­even shorn of its flower-buds, and full only of variegated leaves.  It shall suffice therefore to say that, in a will-less sort of a way, Juliet let the matter drift; that, although she withheld explicit consent, she yet at length allowed Faber to speak as if she had given it; that they had long ceased to talk about God or no God, about life and death, about truth and superstition, and spoke only of love, and the days at hand, and how they would spend them; that they poured out their hearts in praising and worshiping each other; and that, at last, Juliet found herself as firmly engaged to be Paul’s wife, as if she had granted every one of the promises he had sought to draw from her, but which she had avoided giving in the weak fancy that thus she was holding herself free.  It was perfectly understood in all the neighborhood that the doctor and Miss Meredith were engaged.  Both Helen and Dorothy felt a little hurt at her keeping an absolute silence toward them concerning what the country seemed to know; but when they spoke of it to her, she pointedly denied any engagement, and indeed although helplessly drifting toward marriage, had not yet given absolute consent even in her own mind.  She dared not even then regard it as inevitable.  Her two friends came to the conclusion that she could not find the courage to face disapproval, and perhaps feared expostulation.

“She may well be ashamed of such an unequal yoking!” said Helen to her husband.