phrase which introduced his index prohibitory of opinions.  But the old clergyman, having attained a serviceable sense of humour, as well as a heavenly fortitude, went on quietly doing good after the fashion in which he was made.  In his impracticable way he had solved the problem of life by an indiscriminate application of the Golden Rule.  This solution had appeared to him so simple and yet so complete, that he had spent fifty years, with but moderate success, in persuading others to adopt it.  At the end he was not what Mr. Mullen would have called a “shining light,” in the Church, yet his bread cast upon the waters had returned to him in quantities, which, though small and moist, were sufficient, with stringent economy, to keep body and soul together.  One of these quantities he discerned now in the eager young countryman, whose face accompanied him through a trying day, and helped to brighten his self-sacrificing labours.

To Abel, driving home some hours later in his gig, the old clergyman was present less as a mental image, than as a vague yet impelling influence for good.  The impression was still in his thoughts, when he overtook Judy Hatch a mile or two before reaching the crossroads, and stopped to ask her to drive with him as far as her cottage.  At sight of her wan and haggard face, he felt again that impulse of pity, which seemed while it lasted to appease the violence of his suffering.

“I haven’t seen you to speak to for a long time,” he observed, as she mounted over the wheel to her place at his side.

“Not since that day by the brook,” she answered, and flinched as if a raw wound had been touched.

Though she did not look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young summer, with the pulsing of life of the June forest and the scent of wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air.  Her face was lifted to the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song of a thrush rippled like running water, and which gave her, if he had only known it, a likeness to one of the minor saints in a primitive Italian painting.  So little, however, did her passion use her body as its medium that, after glancing casually at her parted lips, he decided that she was probably counting the eggs she had set to hatch in her hen-house, and hesitated to interrupt the absorbing business of her calculations.  Mentally, he regarded her with the ungrudging respect which a man of any sort instinctively yields to a woman who obviously disdains to ensnare his judgment in the mesh of his senses.  The palpitations of her spirit were communicated to him in so elusive a process, that, even while he felt the stir of his pulses, he was not aware that it was due in any measure to the woman at his side.  If she had been pretty—­if she had been even attractively plain—­it would hardly have occurred to him that her intense and breathless expression was associated with the hatching of chickens;