‘Oh, mamma,’ said Margaret, faintly smiling as she kissed her mother, ’I am quite well—­don’t alarm yourself about me; I am only tired.’

Margaret went upstairs.  To soothe her mother’s anxiety she submitted to a basin of gruel.  She was lying languidly in bed when Mrs. Hale came up to make some last inquiries and kiss her before going to her own room for the night.  But the instant she heard her mother’s door locked, she sprang out of bed, and throwing her dressing-gown on, she began to pace up and down the room, until the creaking of one of the boards reminded her that she must make no noise.  She went and curled herself up on the window-seat in the small, deeply-recessed window.  That morning when she had looked out, her heart had danced at seeing the bright clear lights on the church tower, which foretold a fine and sunny day.  This evening—­sixteen hours at most had past by—­she sat down, too full of sorrow to cry, but with a dull cold pain, which seemed to have pressed the youth and buoyancy out of her heart, never to return.  Mr. Henry Lennox’s visit—­his offer—­was like a dream, a thing beside her actual life.  The hard reality was, that her father had so admitted tempting doubts into his mind as to become a schismatic—­an outcast; all the changes consequent upon this grouped themselves around that one great blighting fact.

She looked out upon the dark-gray lines of the church tower, square and straight in the centre of the view, cutting against the deep blue transparent depths beyond, into which she gazed, and felt that she might gaze for ever, seeing at every moment some farther distance, and yet no sign of God!  It seemed to her at the moment, as if the earth was more utterly desolate than if girt in by an iron dome, behind which there might be the ineffaceable peace and glory of the Almighty:  those never-ending depths of space, in their still serenity, were more mocking to her than any material bounds could be—­shutting in the cries of earth’s sufferers, which now might ascend into that infinite splendour of vastness and be lost—­lost for ever, before they reached His throne.  In this mood her father came in unheard.  The moonlight was strong enough to let him see his daughter in her unusual place and attitude.  He came to her and touched her shoulder before she was aware that he was there.

’Margaret, I heard you were up.  I could not help coming in to ask you to pray with me—­to say the Lord’s Prayer; that will do good to both of us.’

Mr. Hale and Margaret knelt by the window-seat—­he looking up, she bowed down in humble shame.  God was there, close around them, hearing her father’s whispered words.  Her father might be a heretic; but had not she, in her despairing doubts not five minutes before, shown herself a far more utter sceptic?  She spoke not a word, but stole to bed after her father had left her, like a child ashamed of its fault.  If the world was full of perplexing problems she would