It was not just so.  Marriage was good to her still.  Not yet, though but a thing of this world, as she and her husband were agreed, had it begun to grow stale and wearisome.  She was troubled.  It was with no reaction against the opinions to which she had practically yielded; but not the less had the serpent of the truth bitten her, for it can bite through the gauze of whatever opinions or theories.  Conscious, persistent wrong may harden and thicken the gauze to a quilted armor, but even through that the sound of its teeth may wake up Don Worm, the conscience, and then is the baser nature between the fell incensed points of mighty opposites.  It avails a man little to say he does not believe this or that, if the while he can not rest because of some word spoken.  True speech, as well as true scripture, is given by inspiration of God; it goes forth on the wind of the Spirit, with the ministry of fire.  The sun will shine, and the wind will blow, the floods will beat, and the fire will burn, until the yielding soul, re-born into childhood, spreads forth its hands and rushes to the Father.

It was dark, and Juliet took the offered arm of the rector and walked with him toward the house.  Both were silent, for both had been touched.  The rector was busy tumbling over the contents now of this now of that old chest and cabinet in the lumber-room of his memory, seeking for things to get rid of by holy confession ere the hour of proclamation should arrive.  He was finding little yet beyond boyish escapades, and faults and sins which he had abjured ages ago and almost forgotten.  His great sin, of which he had already repented, and was studying more and more to repent—­that of undertaking holy service for the sake of the loaves and the fishes—­then, in natural sequence, only taking the loaves and the fishes, and doing no service in return, did not come under the name of hypocrisy, being indeed a crime patent to the universe, even when hidden from himself.  When at length the heavy lids of his honest sleepy-eyed nature arose, and he saw the truth of his condition, his dull, sturdy soul had gathered itself like an old wrestler to the struggle, and hardly knew what was required of it, or what it had to overthrow, till it stood panting over its adversary.

Juliet also was occupied—­with no such search as the rector’s, hardly even with what could be called thought, but with something that must either soon cause the keenest thought, or at length a spiritual callosity:  somewhere in her was a motion, a something turned and twisted, ceased and began again, boring like an auger; or was it a creature that tried to sleep, but ever and anon started awake, and with fretful claws pulled at its nest in the fibers of her heart?

The curate and his wife talked softly all the way back to the house.

“Do you really think,” said Helen, “that every fault one has ever committed will one day be trumpeted out to the universe?”