Eliza awoke with a start.  She raised herself up stiff and chilly.  She looked back upon her dream, at first with confusion and then with contempt.  She lit her lamp and the present was around her again.

“No, I will not go,” she said to herself.  The words had been conned in her fit of rudeness to Sophia Rexford that day, but now they had a wider meaning.

All sweet influences sent out from Heaven to plead with human hearts withdrew for the time, for—­such an awful thing is life—­we have power to repulse God.

CHAPTER XVI.

Robert Trenholme was still obliged to rest his sprained ankle, and was not yet going out, but an opportunity was afforded him of meeting his friendly neighbours, at least the feminine portion of them, in company, sooner than he anticipated.

The day before the college reassembled it happened that the sewing-circle connected with the church met at Mrs. Rexford’s house.  The weather was unusually warm for the season; the workers still preferred to sit out of doors, and the grass under the tree at the front of the house was their place of meeting.  About a dozen were there, among whom Mrs. and Miss Bennett were conspicuous, when Mrs. Brown and her daughter drove up, a little belated, but full of an interesting project.

“Oh, Mrs. Rexford,” they cried, “we have just thought of such a charming plan!  Why not send our carriage on to the college, and beg Principal Trenholme to drive back here and sit an hour or two with us?  It’s so near that, now he is so much better, the motion cannot hurt him; this charming air and the change cannot fail to do him good, so confined as he has been, and we shall all work with the more zeal in his presence.”

The plan was approved by all.  If there were others there who, with Sophia Rexford, doubted whether greater zeal with the needle would be the result of this addition to their party, they made no objections.  They could not but feel that it would be a good thing for the invalid’s solitude to be thus broken in upon, for, for some reason or other, Trenholme had been in solitude lately; he had neither invited visitors nor embraced such opportunity as he had of driving out.

Trenholme answered this invitation in person.  The motherly members of the party attended him at the carriage door when he drove up, and, with almost affectionate kindness, conducted his limping steps to a reclining chair that had been provided.  His crutch, and a certain pensive pallor on his countenance, certainly added to his attractions.  Even Sophia Rexford was almost humble in the attentions she offered him, and the other maidens were demonstrative.  In spite of such protestations as he made, he was enthroned, as it were, in the most comfortable manner.  Fur sleigh robes were spread on the grass for a carpet, and the best of them was used as a rug about his feet.