The moment she had thus far yielded, she began to long to speak of her husband.  Perhaps he can tell her something of him!  At least he could talk about him.  She would have been eager to look on his reflection, had it been possible, in the mind of a dog that loved him.  She would turn the conversation in a direction that might find him.

“But I do not see,” she went on, “how you, Mr. Polwarth—­I think that is your name—­how you can, consistently with your principles,—­”

“Excuse me, ma’am:  I can not even, by silence, seem to admit that you know any thing whatever of my principles.”

“Oh!” she returned, with a smile of generous confession, “I was brought up to believe as you do.”

“That but satisfies me that for the present you are incapable of knowing any thing of my principles.”

“I do not wonder at your thinking so,” she returned, with the condescension of superior education, as she supposed, and yet with the first motion of an unconscious respect for the odd little monster.—­He, with wheezing chest, went on throwing up the deep, damp, fresh earth, to him smelling of marvelous things.  Ruth would have ached all over to see him working so hard!—­“Still,” Juliet went on, “supposing your judgment of me correct, that only makes it the stranger you should imagine that in serving such a one, you are pleasing Him you call your Master.  He says whosoever denies Him before men He will deny before the angels of God.”

“What my Lord says He will do, He will do, as He meant it when He said it:  what He tells me to do, I try to understand and do.  Now He has told me of all things not to say that good comes of evil.  He condemned that in the Pharisees as the greatest of crimes.  When, therefore, I see a man like your husband, helping his neighbors near and far, being kind, indeed loving, and good-hearted to all men,”—­Here a great sigh, checked and broken into many little ones, came in a tremulous chain from the bosom of the wife—­“I am bound to say that man is not scattering his Master abroad.  He is indeed opposing Him in words:  he speaks against the Son of Man; but that the Son of Man Himself says shall be forgiven him.  If I mistake in this, to my own Master I stand or fall.”

“How can He be his Master if he does not acknowledge Him?”

“Because the very tongue with which he denies Him is yet His.  I am the master of the flowers that will now grow by my labor, though not one of them will know me—­how much more must He be the Master of the men He has called into being, though they do not acknowledge Him!  If the story of the gospel be a true one, as with my heart and soul and all that is in me I believe it is, then Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and Master of Mr. Faber, and for him not to acknowledge it is to fall from the summit of his being.  To deny one’s Master, is to be a slave.”

“You are very polite!” said Mrs. Faber, and turned away.  She recalled her imaginary danger, however, and turning again, said, “But though I differ from you in opinion, Mr. Polwarth, I quite recognize you as no common man, and put you upon your honor with regard to my secret.”