“You must not talk,” quoth Tom, who guessed his meaning, and wished to avoid the subject.

“Yes, but I must, sir.  I’ve no time to lose.  If you’d but go and see after those poor Heales, and come again.  I’d like to have one word with Mr. Headley; and my time runs short.”

“A hundred, if you will,” said Frank.

“And now, sir,” when they were alone, “only one thing, if you’ll excuse an old sailor,” and Willis tried vainly to make his usual salutation; but the cramped hand refused to obey,—­“and a dying one too.”

“What is it?”

“Only don’t be hard on the people, sir; the people here.  They’re good-hearted souls, with all their sins, if you’ll only take them as you find them, and consider that they’ve had no chance.”

“Willis, Willis, don’t talk of that!  I shall be a wiser man henceforth, I trust.  At least I shall not trouble Aberalva long.”

“Oh, sir, don’t talk so; and you just getting a hold of them!”

“I?”

“Yes, you, sir.  They’ve found you out at last, thank God.  I always knew what you were and said it.  They’ve found you out in the last week; and there’s not a man in the town but what would die for you, I believe.”

This announcement staggered Frank.  Some men it would have only hardened in their pedantry, and have emboldened them to say:  “Ah! then these men see that a High Churchman can work like any one else, when there is a practical sacrifice to be made.  Now I have a standing ground which no one can dispute from which to go on, and enforce my idea of what he ought to be.”

But, rightly or wrongly, no such thought crossed Frank’s mind.  He was just as good a Churchman as ever—­why not?  Just as fond of his own ideal of what a parish and a Church Service ought to be—­why not?  But the only thought which did rise in his mind was one of utter self-abasement.

“Oh, how blind I have been!  How I have wasted my time in laying down the law to these people:  fancying myself infallible, as if God were not as near to them as He is to me—­certainly nearer than to any book on my shelves—­offending their little prejudices, little superstitions, in my own cruel self-conceit and self-will!  And now, the first time that I forget my own rules; the first time that I forget almost that I am a priest, even a Christian at all! that moment they acknowledge me as a priest, as a Christian.  The moment I meet them upon the commonest human ground, helping them as one heathen would help another, simply because he was his own flesh and blood, that moment they soften to me and show me how much I might have done with them twelve months ago, had I had but common sense!”

He knelt down and prayed by the old man, for him and for himself.

“Would it be troubling you, sir?” said the old man at last.  “But I’d like to take the Sacrament before I go.”

“Of course.  Whom shall I ask in?”

The old man paused awhile.  “I fear it’s selfish:  but it seems to me I would not ask it, but that I know I’m going.  I should like to take it with my maid, once more before I die.”