’You mistake him, indeed you do, my dear Mrs. Dempster; I wish you’d go and hear him preach.’

’Hear him preach!  Why, you wicked woman, you would persuade me to disobey my husband, would you?  O, shocking!  I shall run away from you.  Good-bye.’

A few days after this conversation, however, Janet went to Sally Martin’s about three o’clock in the afternoon.  The pudding that had been sent in for herself and ‘Mammy,’ struck her as just the sort of delicate morsel the poor consumptive girl would be likely to fancy, and in her usual impulsive way she had started up from the dinner table at once, put on her bonnet, and set off with a covered plateful to the neighbouring street.  When she entered the house there was no one to be seen; but in the little sideroom where Sally lay, Janet heard a voice.  It was one she had not heard before, but she immediately guessed it to be Mr. Tryan’s.  Her first impulse was to set down her plate and go away, but Mrs. Martin might not be in, and then there would be no one to give Sally that delicious bit of pudding.  So she stood still, and was obliged to hear what Mr. Tryan was saying.  He was interrupted by one of the invalid’s violent fits of coughing.

‘It is very hard to bear, is it not?’ he said when she was still again.  ’Yet God seems to support you under it wonderfully.  Pray for me, Sally, that I may have strength too when the hour of great suffering comes.  It is one of my worst weaknesses to shrink from bodily pain, and I think the time is perhaps not far off when I shall have to bear what you are bearing.  But now I have tired you.  We have talked enough.  Good-bye.’

Janet was surprised, and forgot her wish not to encounter Mr. Tryan:  the tone and the words were so unlike what she had expected to hear.  There was none of the self-satisfied unction of the teacher, quoting, or exhorting, or expounding, for the benefit of the hearer, but a simple appeal for help, a confession of weakness.  Mr. Tryan had his deeply-felt troubles, then?  Mr. Tryan, too, like herself, knew what it was to tremble at a foreseen trial—­to shudder at an impending burthen, heavier than he felt able to bear?

The most brilliant deed of virtue could not have inclined Janet’s good-will towards Mr. Tryan so much as this fellowship in suffering, and the softening thought was in her eyes when he appeared in the doorway, pale, weary, and depressed.  The sight of Janet standing there with the entire absence of self-consciousness which belongs to a new and vivid impression, made him start and pause a little.  Their eyes met, and they looked at each other gravely for a few moments.  Then they bowed, and Mr. Tryan passed out.

There is a power in the direct glance of a sincere and loving human soul, which will do more to dissipate prejudice and kindle charity than the most elaborate arguments.  The fullest exposition of Mr. Tryan’s doctrine might not have sufficed to convince Janet that he had not an odious self-complacency in believing himself a peculiar child of God; but one direct, pathetic look of his had dissociated him with that conception for ever.