“Only ‘dust to dust’ for me that sicken at your lawless din,—­
     Dust in wholesome old-world dust before the newer world begin!”

“’Wholesome old-world dust’!” he mused—­“Yes!  I think it was more wholesome than our too heavily manured soil!”

And a wave of pained regret and yearning arose in him for the days when life was taken more quietly, more earnestly, more soberly—­with the trust and love of God inspiring the soul to purity and peace—­ when to find a woman who was at the same time an atheist was a thing so abnormal and repulsive as to excite the utmost horror in society.  Society! why, now, many women in society were atheists, and made no secret of their shame!

“I must not dwell on these thoughts,”—­he said, resolutely.  “The sooner I see Brent, the better.  I’ve accepted his invitation for the last week of this month—­I can be spared then for two or three days--indeed, I doubt whether I shall even be missed!  The people only want me on Sundays now—­and—­though I do try not to notice it,—­a good many of the congregation are absent from their usual places.”

He sighed.  He would not admit to himself that it was Maryllia Vancourt—­’Maryllia Van’—­or rather her guests who had exercised a maleficent influence on his little cure of souls, and that because the ‘quality’ did not go to church on Sundays, then some of the villagers,—­like serfs under the sway of nobles,—­stayed away also.  He realised that he had given offence to this same ‘quality,’ by pausing in his reading, when they entered late on the one occasion they did attend divine service,—­but he did not care at all for that.  He knew, that the truth of the mischief wrought by the idle, unthinking upper classes of society, is always precisely what the upper classes do not want to hear;—­and he was perfectly aware in his own mind that his short, but explicit sermon, on the ‘Soul,’ had not been welcome to any one of his aristocratic hearers, while it had been a little over the heads of his own parishioners.

“Mere waste of words!” he mused, with a kind of self-reproach—­“I don’t know why I chose the text or subject at all.  Yes—­yes!—­I do know!  Why do I play the deceiver with myself!  She was there—­so winsome—­so pretty!—­and her soul is sweet and pure;—­it must be sweet and pure, if it can look out of such clear windows as her eyes.  Let all the world go, but keep that soul, I thought!—­and so I spoke as I did.  But I think she scarcely listened—­it was all waste of time, waste of words,—­waste of breath!  I shall be glad to see dear old Brent again.  He wants to talk to me, he says—­and I most certainly want to talk to him.  After the dinner-party at the Manor, I shall be free.  How I dread that party!  How I wish I were not going!  But I have promised her—­and I must not break my word!”