It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey.  Of that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions and character of the minister and his household.

The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages already alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive to many women.  He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy intimacy with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature, and, above all, confidence in one’s powers.  There was little doubt, the gossips maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish would have been willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him that other end of his yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting, unequal to the burden.

That lady must have been some years older than her husband,—­how many we need not inquire too curiously,—­but in vitality she had long passed the prime in which he was still flourishing.  She had borne him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them.  Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of village life wearied her; the parishioners expected too much of her as the minister’s wife; she had wanted more fresh air and more cheerful companionship; and her thoughts had fed too much on death and sin,—­good bitter tonics to increase the appetite for virtue, but not good as food and drink for the spirit.

But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these obvious depressing influences.  She felt that she was no longer to her husband what she had been to him, and felt it with something of self-reproach,—­which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true and tender wife.  Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling, which had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated thought, but lay unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of sleeping or waking consciousness.

The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who came with such intent.  Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon Rumrill, in great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and tremulous voice, who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast with two horns, or the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other points not settled to his mind in Scott’s Commentary.  The minister was always very busy at such times, and made short work of his deacon’s doubts.  Or it might be that an ancient woman, a mother or a grandmother in Israel, came with her questions and her perplexities to her pastor; and it was pretty certain that just at that moment he was very deep in his next sermon, or had a pressing visit to make.