She spoke eagerly, lovingly, believingly.  Juliet shivered, stopped, and laid hold of the baluster rail.  Things had been too much for her that day.  She looked so ill that Helen was again alarmed, but she soon came to herself a little, and they went on to Mrs. Bevis’s room.  She received them most kindly, made Mrs. Faber lie on the sofa, covered her over, for she was still trembling, and got her a glass of wine.  But she could not drink it, and lay sobbing in vain endeavor to control herself.

Meantime the clouds gathered thicker and thicker:  the thunder-peal that frightened the ponies had been but the herald of the storm, and now it came on in earnest.  The rain rushed suddenly on the earth, and as soon as she heard it, Juliet ceased to sob.  At every flash, however, although she lay with her eyes shut, and her face pressed into the pillow, she shivered and moaned.—­“Why should one,” thought Helen, “who is merely and only the child of Nature, find herself so little at home with her?” Presently Mr. Bevis came running in from the stable, drenched in crossing to the house.  As he passed to his room, he opened the door of his wife’s, and looked in.

“I am glad to see you safely housed, ladies,” he said.  “You must make up your minds to stay where you are.  It will not clear before the moon rises, and that will be about midnight.  I will send John to tell your husbands that you are not cowering under a hedge, and will not be home to-night.”

He was a good weather-prophet.  The rain went on.  In the evening the two husbands appeared, dripping.  They had come on horseback together, and would ride home again after dinner.  The doctor would have to be out the greater part of the Sunday, and would gladly leave his wife in such good quarters; the curate would walk out to his preaching in the evening, and drive home with Helen after it, taking Juliet, if she should be able to accompany them.

After dinner, when the ladies had left them, between the two clergymen and the doctor arose the conversation of which I will now give the substance, leaving the commencement, and taking it up at an advanced point.

“Now tell me,” said Faber, in the tone of one satisfied he must be allowed in the right, “which is the nobler—­to serve your neighbor in the hope of a future, believing in a God who will reward you, or to serve him in the dark, obeying your conscience, with no other hope than that those who come after you will be the better for you?”

“I allow most heartily,” answered Wingfold, “and with all admiration, that it is indeed grand in one hopeless for himself to live well for the sake of generations to come, which he will never see, and which will never hear of him.  But I will not allow that there is any thing grand in being hopeless for one’s self, or in serving the Unseen rather than those about you, seeing it is easier to work for those who can not oppose you, than to endure the contradiction of sinners.  But I know you