And again, there was the government official, intrusted with public money, which, in those days, implied that he was supposed to be honest.  A single look of that heavenly countenance, and two words of gentle command, were enough for him.  Neither of these men, the early disciple, nor the evangelist, seems to have been thinking primarily about his own personal safety.

But now look at the poor, miserable turnkey, whose occupation shows what he was like to be, and who had just been thrusting two respectable strangers, taken from the hands of a mob, covered with stripes and stripped of clothing, into the inner prison, and making their feet fast in the stocks.  His thought, in the moment of terror, is for himself:  first, suicide; then, what he shall do,—­not to save his household,—­not to fulfil his duty to his office,—­not to repair the outrage he has been committing,—­but to secure his own personal safety.  Truly, character shows itself as much in a man’s way of becoming a Christian as in any other!

—­Elsie sat, statue-like, through the sermon.  It would not be fair to the reader to give an abstract of that.  When a man who has been bred to free thought and free speech suddenly finds himself stepping about, like a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-votes which he must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and angels.  Submission to intellectual precedent and authority does very well for those who have been bred to it; we know that the underground courses of their minds are laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and that stately and splendid structures may be reared on such a foundation.  But to see one laying a platform over heretical quicksands, thirty or forty or fifty years deep, and then beginning to build upon it, is a sorry sight.  A new convert from the reformed to the ancient faith may be very strong in the arms, but he will always have weak legs and shaky knees.  He may use his hands well, and hit hard with his fists, but he will never stand on his legs in the way the man does who inherits his belief.

The services were over at last, and Dudley Venner and his daughter walked home together in silence.  He always respected her moods, and saw clearly enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her.  There was nothing to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never talk of her griefs.  An hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with perhaps a sudden flash of violence:  this was the way in which the impressions which make other women weep, and tell their griefs by word or letter, showed their effects in her mind and acts.

She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day, after their return.  No one saw just where she went,—­indeed, no one knew its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did.  She was gone until late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for her, bound up her long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the cold dews.