I left the house in a gloomy mood.  I know I ought to have looked up to God and said:  “These things do not reach to Thee, my Father.  Thou art ever the same; and I rise above my small as well as my great troubles by remembering Thy peace, and Thy unchangeable Godhood to me and all Thy creatures.”  But I did not come to myself all at once.  The thought of God had not come, though it was pretty sure to come before I got home.  I was brooding over the littleness of all I could do; and feeling that sickness which sometimes will overtake a man in the midst of the work he likes best, when the unpleasant parts of it crowd upon him, and his own efforts, especially those made from the will without sustaining impulse, come back upon him with a feeling of unreality, decay, and bitterness, as if he had been unnatural and untrue, and putting himself in false relations by false efforts for good.  I know this all came from selfishness—­thinking about myself instead of about God and my neighbour.  But so it was.—­And so I was walking down the avenue, where it was now very dark, with my head bent to the ground, when I in my turn started at the sound of a woman’s voice, and looking up, saw by the starlight the dim form of Miss Oldcastle standing before me.

She spoke first.

“Mr Walton, I was very rude to you.  I beg your pardon.”

“Indeed, I did not think so.  I only thought what a blundering awkward fellow I was to startle you as I did.  You have to forgive me.”

“I fancy”—­and here I know she smiled, though how I know I do not know—­“I fancy I have made that even,” she said, pleasantly; “for you must confess I startled you now.”

“You did; but it was in a very different way.  I annoyed you with my rudeness.  You only scattered a swarm of bats that kept flapping their skinny wings in my face.”

“What do you mean?  There are no bats at this time of the year.”

“Not outside.  In ‘winter and rough weather’ they creep inside, you know.”

“Ah!  I ought to understand you.  But I did not think you were ever like that.  I thought you were too good.”

“I wish I were.  I hope to be some day.  I am not yet, anyhow.  And I thank you for driving the bats away in the meantime.”

“You make me the more ashamed of myself to think that perhaps my rudeness had a share in bringing them.—­Yours is no doubt thankless labour sometimes.”

She seemed to make the last remark just to prevent the conversation from returning to her as its subject.  And now all the bright portions of my work came up before me.

“You are quite mistaken in that, Miss Oldcastle.  On the contrary, the thanks I get are far more than commensurate with the labour.  Of course one meets with a disappointment sometimes, but that is only when they don’t know what you mean.  And how should they know what you mean till they are different themselves?—­You remember what Wordsworth says on this very subject in his poem of Simon Lee?”—­