the ways of the world, and read little save old and belated newspapers, so that they were ignorant of his newly celebrated personality,—­till one day the Fates gave him that chance for which, though he was unconscious of it, he had been holding himself back, and counting the slow strokes of time;—­time which seems to beat with such a laggard pulse when one sees some great thing needing to be done, and while feeling all the force to do it, yet has to control and keep back that force till the appointed hour strikes for action.

There had been a terrific storm at sea, and a herring smack had gone down within sight of land, sinking eight strong men with it, all husbands and fathers.  One after the other, the eight bodies were thrown back from the surging deep in the sullen grey morning on the day after the catastrophe,—­one after the other they were borne reverently up from the shore to the village, there to be claimed by shrieking women and sobbing children,—­women, who from more or less contented, simple-hearted, hard-working souls, were transformed into the grandly infuriated forms of Greek tragedy—­their arms tossing, their hair streaming, their faces haggard with pain, and their eyes blind with tears.  Throughout the heart-rending scene, Aubrey Leigh worked silently with the rest—­composing the stiff limbs of the dead, and reverently closing the glared and staring eyes; gently he had lifted fainting women from the corpses to which they clung,—­ tenderly he had carried crying children home to their beds,—­and with sorrowful eyes fixed on the still heaving and angry billows, he had inwardly prayed for ways and means to comfort these afflicted ones, and raised their thoughts from the gloom of the grave to some higher consummation of life.  For they were inconsolable,—­they could neither see nor understand any adequate cause for such grief being inflicted on them,—­and the entire little population of the village wore a resentful attitude towards God, and God’s inexorable law of death.  When the funeral day came, and the bodies of the eight unfortunate victims were committed to the earth, it happened, as fate would have it, that the rector of the parish, a kindly, sympathetic, very simple old man, who really did his best for his parishoners according to the faint perception of holy things that indistinctly illumined his brain, happened to be away, and his place was taken by the assistant curate, a man of irritable and hasty temper, who had a horror of “scenes,” and who always put away all suggestions of death from him whenever it was possible.  It was very disagreeable to him to have to look at eight coffins,—­and still more disagreeable to see eight weeping widows surrounded by forlorn and fatherless children—­and he gabbled over the funeral service as quickly as he could, keeping his eyes well on the book lest he should see some sobbing child looking at him, or some woman dropping in a dead faint before he had time to finish.  He was afraid of unpleasant incidents—­and yet with all his brusque and nervous hurry to avoid anything of the kind, an unpleasant incident insisted on manifesting itself.  Just as the fourth coffin was being lowered into the ground, a wild-haired girl rushed forward and threw herself upon it.