the wanderers and sustain the feeble:  he was conscious of a new yearning for those pure human joys which he had voluntarily and determinedly banished from his life—­for a draught of that deep affection from which he had been cut off by a dark chasm of remorse.  For now, that affection was within his reach; he saw it there, like a palm-shadowed well in the desert; he could not desire to die in sight of it.

And so the autumn rolled gently by in its ‘calm decay’.  Until November.  Mr. Tryan continued to preach occasionally, to ride about visiting his flock, and to look in at his schools:  but his growing satisfaction in Mr. Walsh as his successor saved him from too eager exertion and from worrying anxieties.  Janet was with him a great deal now, for she saw that he liked her to read to him in the lengthening evenings, and it became the rule for her and her mother to have tea at Holly Mount, where, with Mrs. Pettifer, and sometimes another friend or two, they brought Mr. Tryan the unaccustomed enjoyment of companionship by his own fireside.

Janet did not share his new hopes, for she was not only in the habit of hearing Mr. Pratt’s opinion that Mr. Tryan could hardly stand out through the winter, but she also knew that it was shared by Dr Madely of Rotherby, whom, at her request, he had consented to call in.  It was not necessary or desirable to tell Mr. Tryan what was revealed by the stethoscope, but Janet knew the worst.

She felt no rebellion under this prospect of bereavement, but rather a quiet submissive sorrow.  Gratitude that his influence and guidance had been given her, even if only for a little while—­gratitude that she was permitted to be with him, to take a deeper and deeper impress from daily communion with him, to be something to him in these last months of his life, was so strong in her that it almost silenced regret.  Janet had lived through the great tragedy of woman’s life.  Her keenest personal emotions had been poured forth in her early love—­her wounded affection with its years of anguish—­her agony of unavailing pity over that deathbed seven months ago.  The thought of Mr. Tryan was associated for her with repose from that conflict of emotion, with trust in the unchangeable, with the influx of a power to subdue self.  To have been assured of his sympathy, his teaching, his help, all through her life, would have been to her like a heaven already begun—­a deliverance from fear and danger; but the time was not yet come for her to be conscious that the hold he had on her heart was any other than that of the heaven-sent friend who had come to her like the angel in the prison, and loosed her bonds, and led her by the hand till she could look back on the dreadful doors that had once closed her in.