purpose or drift of nature, but even the main points of a past moral history.  Sometimes indeed he would recoil with terror from what seemed the threatened dawn in him of a mysterious power, probably latent in every soul, of reading the future of a person brought within certain points of spiritual range.  What startled him, however, may have been simply an involuntary conclusion, instantaneously drawn, from the plain convergence of all the forces in and upon the individual toward a point of final deliverance or of near catastrophe:  when “the mortal instruments” are steadily working for evil, the only hope of deliverance lies in catastrophe.

When Polwarth had thus an opportunity of reading Juliet’s countenance, it was not wearing its usual expression:  the ferment set at work in her mind by the curate’s sermon had intensified the strangeness of it, even to something almost of definement; and it so arrested him that after the ponies had darted away like birds, he stood for a whole minute in the spot and posture in which they had left him.

“I never saw Polwarth look distrait before,” said the curate, and was about to ask Juliet whether she had not been bewitching him, when the far-away, miserable look of her checked him, and he dropped back into his seat in silence.

But Polwarth had had no sudden insight into Juliet’s condition; all he had seen was, that she was strangely troubled—­and that with no single feeling; that there was an undecided contest in her spirit; that something was required of her which she had not yet resolved to yield.  Almost the moment she vanished from his sight, it dawned upon him that she had a secret.  As one knows by the signs of the heavens that the matter of a storm is in them and must break out, so Polwarth had read in Juliet’s sky the inward throes of a pent convulsion.

He knew something of the doctor, for he had met him again and again where he himself was trying to serve; but they had never had conversation together.  Faber had not an idea of what was in the creature who represented to him one of Nature’s failures at man-making; while Polwarth, from what he heard and saw of the doctor, knew him better than he knew himself; and although the moment when he could serve him had not begun to appear, looked for such a moment to come.  There was so much good in the man, that his heart longed to give him something worth having.  How Faber would have laughed at the notion!  But Polwarth felt confident that one day the friendly doctor would be led out of the miserable desert where he cropped thistles and sage and fancied himself a hero.  And now in the drawn look of his wife’s face, in the broken lights of her eye, in the absorption and the start, he thought he perceived the quarter whence unwelcome deliverance might be on its way, and resolved to keep attention awake for what might appear.  In his inmost being he knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbors.  But