’It is right to hope for the best about everybody, and not to expect the worst.  This sounds like a truism, but it has comforted me before now, and some day you’ll find it useful.  One has always to try to think more of others than of oneself, and it is best not to prejudge people on the bad side.  My sermons aren’t long, are they?  Have they given you an appetite for lunch?  Sermons always make me hungry, I know.’

He appeared to be waiting for her to get up and come along with him, as indeed he was.  But he meant her to perceive that he should not leave her; so she rose up languidly, too languid to say how much she should prefer being left alone, if he would only go away without her.  She was very weak, and stumbled over the straggling root of a tree that projected across the path.  He, watchful though silent, saw this stumble, and putting out his hand held her up from falling.  He still held her hand when the occasion was past; this little physical failure impressed on his heart how young and helpless she was, and he yearned to her, remembering the passion of sorrow in which he had found her, and longing to be of some little tender bit of comfort to her, before they parted—­before their tete-a-tete walk was merged in the general familiarity of the household life.  Yet he did not know what to say.

‘You will have thought me hard,’ he burst out at length, as they were nearing the drawing-room windows and the garden-door.  ’I never can manage to express what I feel, somehow I always fall to philosophizing, but I am sorry for you.  Yes, I am; it’s beyond my power to help you, as far as altering facts goes, but I can feel for you, in a way which it’s best not to talk about, for it can do no good.  Remember how sorry I am for you!  I shall often be thinking of you, though I daresay it’s best not to talk about it again.’

She said, ‘I know you are sorry,’ under her breath, and then she broke away, and ran indoors, and upstairs to the solitude of her own room.  He went straight to his mother, who was sitting before the untasted luncheon, as much annoyed by the mysterious unpunctuality of her visitor as she was capable of being with anything; for she had heard that Mr. Gibson had been, and was gone, and she could not discover if he had left any message for her; and her anxiety about her own health, which some people esteemed hypochondriacal, always made her particularly craving for the wisdom which might fall from her doctor’s lips.

‘Where have you been, Roger?  Where is Molly?—­Miss Gibson, I mean,’ for she was careful to keep up a barrier of forms between the young man and young woman who were thrown together in the same household.

’I’ve been out dredging. (By the way, I left my net on the terrace walk.) I found Miss Gibson sitting there, crying as if her heart would break.  Her father is going to be married again.’

‘Married again!  You don’t say so.’

’Yes, he is; and she takes it very hardly, poor girl.  Mother, I think if you could send some one to her with a glass of wine, a cup of tea, or something of that sort—­she was very nearly fainting——­’