“With pleasure,” was the smiling response.

“What will your Dr. Hill think if he hears you have been to hear Lathrop?”

“I must endeavor to live above public opinion, as well as you.”

“I am afraid such elevation would chill you.”

“Don’t you want Mrs. Flaxman to go?”

“I have nothing to say against it, if she has courage to brave public opinion.”

“I did not think you reckoned me such a coward.”

“That shows how little we know what our intimate friends think of us; if there was a general laying bare of hearts, methinks there would be lively times for a while.”

I stood thinking his words over very seriously, and then turning to him said, gravely:—­

“I would be willing for nearly all my friends to see my thoughts respecting them.”

“There would be some exceptions, then.  You said nearly all, remember.  The few might be the ones most anxious to know, and upon whom the restriction would bear most heavily.”

“They might not care what I thought,” I said with a hot flush; something in his look making me tremble.

“If we are to be in time for church we should leave very shortly,” he said, looking at his watch.

“And we are really going to Beech Street Church this evening?”

“Yes, really,” he said, with that genial smile I was beginning to regard like a caress.

Mrs. Flaxman and I hastened to our rooms; she nearly as well pleased as I. It seemed quite too good to be true that we three were to go in company to those meetings where men and women talked to each other, and to God, of all the great things He was doing for them.  I was very speedily robed and back in the drawing-room, where Mr. Winthrop was still sitting gazing into the fire with that indrawn, abstracted expression on his face which was habitual to it in repose.  I waited silently near until Mrs. Flaxman should come in and interrupt his reverie.  I liked to watch his face in those rare moments, and used to speculate on what he might be thinking, and wishing my own thoughts were high and strong enough to follow his on their long upward flight.

He looked at me suddenly.

“What, if I could read your thoughts now, Medoline?  From your intent look I think I was the subject of your meditations.”  I smiled calmly.

“You would have been flattered, as you were this morning, perhaps.  I was just wishing I was capable of going with you along those high paths where, by your face, I knew you were straying.”

“Was that what you were thinking about, and that only?”

My face crimsoned, but I looked up bravely into the honest eyes watching me.

“Must I confess even my thoughts to you, Mr. Winthrop?  I have had to ask that question before?”

“Not necessarily.  But I have a fancy just now to know what else you were thinking of.”

I hesitated a moment, and then said bravely:  “I was looking at your face, and it occurred to me that in some faces there was the same power to thrill one’s soul that there is in splendid music, or poems that can never die.”