was a good many indulged a false hope.  To this, others objected her life of utter self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother as some evidence of Christian character.  But old Deacon Rumrill put down that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott’s Commentary on Romans xi. 1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being called, and that the better her disposition to perform good works, the more unlikely she was to be the subject of saving grace.  Some of these severe critics were good people enough themselves, but they loved active work and stirring companionship, and would have found their real cross if they had been called to sit at an invalid’s bedside.

As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so much time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly have prompted.  He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited not only her mother’s youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness which, born with some of God’s creatures, is, if not “grace,” at least a manifestation of native depravity which might well be mistaken for it.

The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single point.  There was one subject on which no word ever passed between them.  The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a mantle to cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the husband and father, and no word ever passed between them implying a suspicion of the loyalty of his affections.  Bathsheba came at last so to fill with her tenderness the space left empty in the neglected heart, that her mother only spoke her habitual feeling when she said, “I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter.”

This was a dangerous state of things for the minister.  Strange suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams and reveries.  The thought once admitted that another’s life is becoming superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on the soul.  Woe to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching the hour-glass through which the sands run too slowly for longings that are like a skulking procession of bloodless murders!  Without affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.