Her fingers dropped from the frilling of her nightgown, and her fierce black eyes flashed at me.

“Quite the contrary!” she said.  “It was news I was interested in hearing—­and I am deeply indebted to Mr. Bruff for telling me of it.”

“Yes?” I said, in a tone of gentle interest.

Her fingers went back to the frilling, and she turned her head sullenly away from me.  I had been met in this manner, in the course of plying the good work, hundreds of times.  She merely stimulated me to try again.  In my dauntless zeal for her welfare, I ran the great risk, and openly alluded to her marriage engagement.

“News you were interested in hearing?” I repeated.  “I suppose, my dear Rachel, that must be news of Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite?”

She started up in the bed, and turned deadly pale.  It was evidently on the tip of her tongue to retort on me with the unbridled insolence of former times.  She checked herself—­laid her head back on the pillow—­considered a minute—­and then answered in these remarkable words: 

“I shall never marry Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite.”

It was my turn to start at that.

“What can you possibly mean?” I exclaimed.  “The marriage is considered by the whole family as a settled thing!”

“Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite is expected here to-day,” she said doggedly.  “Wait till he comes—­and you will see.”

“But my dear Rachel——­”

She rang the bell at the head of her bed.  The person with the cap-ribbons appeared.

“Penelope! my bath.”

Let me give her her due.  In the state of my feelings at that moment, I do sincerely believe that she had hit on the only possible way of forcing me to leave the room.

By the mere worldly mind my position towards Rachel might have been viewed as presenting difficulties of no ordinary kind.  I had reckoned on leading her to higher things by means of a little earnest exhortation on the subject of her marriage.  And now, if she was to be believed, no such event as her marriage was to take place at all.  But ah, my friends! a working Christian of my experience (with an evangelising prospect before her) takes broader views than these.  Supposing Rachel really broke off the marriage, on which the Ablewhites, father and son, counted as a settled thing, what would be the result?  It could only end, if she held firm, in an exchanging of hard words and bitter accusations on both sides.  And what would be the effect on Rachel when the stormy interview was over?  A salutary moral depression would be the effect.  Her pride would be exhausted, her stubbornness would be exhausted, by the resolute resistance which it was in her character to make under the circumstances.  She would turn for sympathy to the nearest person who had sympathy to offer.  And I was that nearest person—­brimful of comfort, charged to overflowing with seasonable and reviving words.  Never had the evangelising prospect looked brighter, to my eyes, than it looked now.