“Do not trouble her, Mrs. Ferguson, about her shawl.  You know I have taken her—­that is, we have taken one another ‘for better, for worse,’ and it is little matter what sort of clothes she wears.”

Christian, as she passed him, gave her husband a grateful look.  Grateful, alas!  Love does not understand, or even recognize, gratitude.

But when the door closed after her, Dr. Grey’s eyes rested on it like those of one who misses a light.

He sat down covering his mouth—­his firmly-set but excessively sensitive month with his hand, an attitude which was one of his peculiarities; for he had many, which the world excused because of his learning, and his friends—­well, because of himself.

If ever there was a man who without the slightest obtrusiveness, or self-assertion of any kind, had unlimited influence over those about him, it was Arnold Grey.  Throughout a life spent entirely within the college walls, he had, from freshman to fellow, from thence to tutor, and so on to the early dignity of mastership, the most extraordinary faculty of making people do whatsoever he liked—–­ay, and enjoy the doing of it.  Friends, acquaintances, undergraduates, even down to children and servants, all did, more or less, sooner or later, the good pleasure of Dr. Grey.  Perhaps the secret of this was that his “pleasure” was never merely his own.  None wield such absolute power over others as those who think little about themselves.

Had circumstance, or his own inclination, led him out farther into the world, he might have been noticeable there, for he had very great and varied acquirements—–­more acquirements perhaps, than originalities.  He had never written a book, but he had read almost every book that ever was written—­or, at least, such was the belief current in Avonsbridge.  In his study he was literally entombed in books—–­ volumes in all languages—­and Avonsbridge supposed him able to read them all.  How far this was a popular superstition, and to what length his learning went, it is impossible to say.  But nobody ever came quite to the end of it.  He was a silent, modest man, who never spoke much of what he knew, or of himself in any wise.  His strongest outward characteristic was quietness, both of manner, speech, motions, springing, it appeared, out of a corresponding quietness of soul.  Whether it had been born with him, or through what storms of human passion and suffering he had attained to this permanent central calm, who could say?  Certainly nobody knew or was likely to know; for the Master of Saint Bede’s was a person, the depth of whose nature could not be fathomed easily with any line.  Possibly because, old as he was, it happened, as does happen in some lives, that the right plumb-line, by the right hand, had never been dropped yet.