“Dear son John,” replied the Rector sardonically, “we received last post your compliments of condolence and congratulation to your mother on the supposition of her near approaching demise, to which your sister Patty will by no means subscribe; for she says she is not so good a philosopher as you are, and that she can’t spare her mother yet, if it please God, without great inconveniency.  And indeed, though she has now and then some very sick fits, yet I hope the sight of you would revive her.  However, when you come you will see a new face of things, my family being now pretty well colonised, and all perfect harmony—­much happier, in no small straits, than perhaps we ever were in our greatest affluence.”

Molly, while she helped to cook the miserable meals which could not tempt her mother’s appetite, or looked abroad upon the desolate floods, saw with absolute clearness that this apparent peace was but the peace of exhaustion.  Yet it was true that—­thanks to her—­the pinch of poverty had relaxed.  The larger debts were paid:  for some months she had not opened the door to a dunning tradesman.  The floods, as by a miracle, had spared her crops and she had a scheme for getting her surplus vegetables conveyed to Epworth market.  Already she had opened up a trade in fowls with a travelling dealer.  “Molly,” wrote her father, “miraculously gets money even in Wroote, and has given the first fruit of her earning to her mother, lending her money, and presenting her with a new cloak of her own buying and making, for which God will bless her.”

Her secret dissent did not escape the Rector’s eye, so alert for every sign of defiance:  but in his expanding sense of success he let it pass.  There was another, however, who divined it and watched it anxiously day after dreary day, for it answered a trouble in his own breast.

Johnny Whitelamb was now almost a man grown:  but what really separated him from the Johnny Whitelamb of two years ago was no increase in stature or in knowledge.  That which grew within him, and still grew, defying all efforts to kill it, was—­a doubt.  It had been born in him—­no bigger then than a grain of mustard-seed—­on the day when he sought Hetty to send her to the house where William Wright waited for her answer.  Until then the Rector had been to him a divine man, in wisdom and goodness very little lower than the angels.  And now—­

He fought it hard, at first in terror, at length in cold desperation.  But still the doubt grew.  And the worst was that Molly guessed his secret.  He feared to meet her eye.  It seemed to him that he and she were bound in some monstrous conspiracy.  He spent hours in wrestling with it.  At times he would rise from table on some stammered excuse, rush off to the fields and there, in a hidden corner, fall on his knees and pray, or even lie at full length, his face hidden in the grasses, his body writhing, his ungainly legs twisting and untwisting.  And still the doubt grew.