two days had set her up afresh, with new strength and brighter hope.  Plans which had lately appeared to her in the guise of tasks, now appeared like pleasures.  The morbid scales had fallen from her eyes, and she saw her position and her work more truly.  If only Mr. Thornton would restore her the lost friendship,—­nay, if he would only come from time to time to cheer her father as in former days,—­though she should never see him, she felt as if the course of her future life, though not brilliant in prospect, might lie clear and even before her.  She sighed as she rose up to go to bed.  In spite of the ’One step’s enough for me,’—­in spite of the one plain duty of devotion to her father,—­there lay at her heart an anxiety and a pang of sorrow.

And Mr. Hale thought of Margaret, that April evening, just as strangely and as persistently as she was thinking of him.  He had been fatigued by going about among his old friends and old familiar places.  He had had exaggerated ideas of the change which his altered opinions might make in his friends’ reception of him; but although some of them might have felt shocked or grieved or indignant at his falling off in the abstract, as soon as they saw the face of the man whom they had once loved, they forgot his opinions in himself; or only remembered them enough to give an additional tender gravity to their manner.  For Mr. Hale had not been known to many; he had belonged to one of the smaller colleges, and had always been shy and reserved; but those who in youth had cared to penetrate to the delicacy of thought and feeling that lay below his silence and indecision, took him to their hearts, with something of the protecting kindness which they would have shown to a woman.  And the renewal of this kindliness, after the lapse of years, and an interval of so much change, overpowered him more than any roughness or expression of disapproval could have done.

‘I’m afraid we’ve done too much,’ said Mr. Bell.  ’You’re suffering now from having lived so long in that Milton air.

‘I am tired,’ said Mr. Hale.  ’But it is not Milton air.  I’m fifty-five years of age, and that little fact of itself accounts for any loss of strength.’

’Nonsense!  I’m upwards of sixty, and feel no loss of strength, either bodily or mental.  Don’t let me hear you talking so.  Fifty-five! why, you’re quite a young man.’

Mr. Hale shook his head.  ‘These last few years!’ said he.  But after a minute’s pause, he raised himself from his half recumbent position, in one of Mr. Bell’s luxurious easy-chairs, and said with a kind of trembling earnestness: