“That were hardly worth the while of the universe,” answered her husband.  “Such an age-long howling of evil stupidities would be enough to turn its brain with ennui and disgust.  Nevertheless, the hypocrite will certainly know himself discovered and shamed, and unable any longer to hide himself from his neighbor.  His past deeds also will be made plain to all who, for further ends of rectification, require to know them.  Shame will then, I trust, be the first approach of his redemption.”

Juliet, for she was close behind them, heard his words and shuddered.

“You are feeling it cold, Mrs. Faber,” said the rector, and, with the fatherly familiarity of an old man, drew her cloak better around her.

“It is not cold,” she faltered; “but somehow the night-air always makes me shiver.”

The rector pulled a muffler from his coat-pocket, and laid it like a scarf on her shoulders.

“How kind you are!” she murmured.  “I don’t deserve it.”

“Who deserves any thing?” said the rector.  “I less, I am sure, than any one I know.  Only, if you will believe my curate, you have but to ask, and have what you need.”

“I wasn’t the first to say that, sir,” Wingfold struck in, turning his head over his shoulder.

“I know that, my boy,” answered Mr. Bevis; “but you were the first to make me want to find its true.—­I say, Mrs. Faber, what if it should turn out after all, that there was a grand treasure hid in your field and mine, that we never got the good of because we didn’t believe it was there and dig for it?  What if this scatter-brained curate of mine should be right when he talks so strangely about our living in the midst of calling voices, cleansing fires, baptizing dews, and won’t hearken, won’t be clean, won’t give up our sleep and our dreams for the very bliss for which we cry out in them!”

The old man had stopped, taken off his hat, and turned toward her.  He spoke with such a strange solemnity of voice that it could hardly have been believed his by those who knew him as a judge of horses and not as a reader of prayers.  The other pair had stopped also.

“I should call it very hard,” returned Juliet, “to come so near it and yet miss it.”

“Especially to be driven so near it against one’s will, and yet succeed in getting past without touching it,” said the curate, with a flavor of asperity.  His wife gently pinched his arm, and he was ashamed.

When they reached home, Juliet went straight to bed—­or at least to her room for the night.

“I say, Wingfold,” remarked the rector, as they sat alone after supper, “that sermon of yours was above your congregation.”

“I am afraid you are right, sir.  I am sorry.  But if you had seen their faces as I did, perhaps you would have modified the conclusion.”

“I am very glad I heard it, though,” said the rector.

They had more talk, and when Wingfold went up stairs, he found Helen asleep.  Annoyed with himself for having spoken harshly to Mrs. Faber, and more than usually harassed by a sense of failure in his sermon, he threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding and praying till the light began to appear.  Out of the reeds shaken all night in the wind, rose with the morning this bird:—­