of the moonlit fields.  She closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and sky.  That was often Dinah’s mode of praying in solitude.  Simply to close her eyes and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence; then gradually her fears, her yearning anxieties for others, melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean.  She had sat in this way perfectly still, with her hands crossed on her lap and the pale light resting on her calm face, for at least ten minutes when she was startled by a loud sound, apparently of something falling in Hetty’s room.  But like all sounds that fall on our ears in a state of abstraction, it had no distinct character, but was simply loud and startling, so that she felt uncertain whether she had interpreted it rightly.  She rose and listened, but all was quiet afterwards, and she reflected that Hetty might merely have knocked something down in getting into bed.  She began slowly to undress; but now, owing to the suggestions of this sound, her thoughts became concentrated on Hetty—­that sweet young thing, with life and all its trials before her—­the solemn daily duties of the wife and mother—­and her mind so unprepared for them all, bent merely on little foolish, selfish pleasures, like a child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long toilsome journey in which it will have to bear hunger and cold and unsheltered darkness.  Dinah felt a double care for Hetty, because she shared Seth’s anxious interest in his brother’s lot, and she had not come to the conclusion that Hetty did not love Adam well enough to marry him.  She saw too clearly the absence of any warm, self-devoting love in Hetty’s nature to regard the coldness of her behaviour towards Adam as any indication that he was not the man she would like to have for a husband.  And this blank in Hetty’s nature, instead of exciting Dinah’s dislike, only touched her with a deeper pity:  the lovely face and form affected her as beauty always affects a pure and tender mind, free from selfish jealousies.  It was an excellent divine gift, that gave a deeper pathos to the need, the sin, the sorrow with which it was mingled, as the canker in a lily-white bud is more grievous to behold than in a common pot-herb.

By the time Dinah had undressed and put on her night-gown, this feeling about Hetty had gathered a painful intensity; her imagination had created a thorny thicket of sin and sorrow, in which she saw the poor thing struggling torn and bleeding, looking with tears for rescue and finding none.  It was in this way that Dinah’s imagination and sympathy acted and reacted habitually, each heightening the other.  She felt a deep longing to go now and pour into Hetty’s ear all the words of tender warning and appeal that rushed into her mind.  But perhaps Hetty was already asleep.  Dinah put her ear to the partition and heard still some slight noises, which convinced her that Hetty