remarked how devoutly he read them, and his presence was a great comfort to Wingfold.  He often objected to what his curate preached—­but only to his face, and seldom when they were not alone.  There was policy in this restraint:  he had come to see that in all probability he would have to give in—­that his curate would most likely satisfy him that he was right.  The relation between them was marvelous and lovely.  The rector’s was a quiet awakening, a gentle second birth almost in old age.  But then he had been but a boy all the time, and a very good sort of boy.  He had acted in no small measure according to the light he had, and time was of course given him to grow in.  It is not the world alone that requires the fullness of its time to come, ere it can receive a revelation; the individual also has to pass through his various stages of Pagan, Guebre, Moslem, Jew, Essene—­God knows what all—­before he can begin to see and understand the living Christ.  The child has to pass through all the phases of lower animal life; when, change is arrested, he is born a monster; and in many a Christian the rudiments of former stages are far from extinct—­not seldom revive, and for the time seem to reabsorb the development, making indeed a monstrous show.

“For myself,”—­I give a passage from Wingfold’s note-book, written for his wife’s reading—­“I feel sometimes as if I were yet a pagan, struggling hard to break through where I see a glimmer of something better, called Christianity.  In any case what I have, can be but a foretaste of what I have yet to be; and if so, then indeed is there a glory laid up for them that will have God, the I of their I, to throne it in the temple he has built, to pervade the life he has lifed out of himself.  My soul is now as a chaos with a hungry heart of order buried beneath its slime, that longs and longs for the moving of the breath of God over its water and mud.”

The foundation-stone of the chapel was to be laid with a short and simple ceremony, at which no clergy but themselves were to be present.  The rector had not consented, and the curate had not urged, that it should remain unconsecrated; it was therefore uncertain, so far at least as Wingfold knew, whether it was to be chapel or lecture hall.  In either case it was for the use and benefit of the villagers, and they were all invited to be present.  A few of the neighbors who were friends of the rector and his wife, were also invited, and among them was Miss Meredith.

Mr. and Mrs. Bevis had long ere now called upon her, and found her, as Mrs. Bevis said, fit for any society.  She had lunched several times with them, and, her health being now greatly restored, was the readier to accept the present invitation, that she was growing again anxious about employment.

Almost every one was taken with her sweet manner, shaded with sadness.  At one time self-dissatisfaction had made her too anxious to please:  in the mirror of other minds she sought a less unfavorable reflection of herself.  But trouble had greatly modified this tendency, and taken the too-much out of her courtesy.