“How can I stop to think whether it is good or not,” said Esther, “when I hear you telling all our secrets to our whole visiting list?  I could think of nothing but myself, and how I could get away.”

“And whose secrets can I tell if not our own?” asked Hazard triumphant.

While he was with her Esther was peaceful and happy, but no sooner had he gone than her terrors began again.

“He will find me out, Catherine, and it will break my heart,” she said.  “I never knew I had a jealous temper.  I am horribly narrow-minded.  I’m not fit for him, and I knew it when he asked me.  He will hate me when he finds what a wife he has got.”

Catherine, who positively declined to recognize Mr. Hazard’s superiority of mind over Esther, took this with unshaken fortitude.  “If you can stand it, I guess he can,” she remarked curtly.  “Where do you expect the poor man to get a wife, if all of us say we are not fit for him?”

This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long—­the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.  Try which way she would there was no escape from her anxiety.  Hazard, who had foreseen some trouble from her old associations with loose religious opinion, had taken it for granted, with his usual self-confidence, that from the moment she came within the reach of his faith and took a place by his side she would find no difficulties that he could not easily overcome.  “Love is the great magnet of life, and Religion,” he said “is Love.”  Nothing could be simpler than his plan, as he explained to her.  She had but to trust herself to him and all was sure to go well.  So long as he was with her and could gently thrust aside every idea but that of their own happiness, all went as well as he promised; but unluckily for his plan, Esther had all her life been used to act for herself and to order others rather than take orders of any sort.  The more confidently Hazard told her to leave every thing to him, the less it occurred to her to do so.  She could no more allow him to come into her life and take charge of her thoughts than to go down into her kitchen and take charge of her cook.  He might reason with her by the hour, and quite convince her that nothing was of the least consequence provided it were left entirely in his hands, but the moment he was out of sight she forgot that he was to be the keeper of her conscience, and, without a thought of her dependence, she resumed the charge of her own affairs.

Her first idea was to learn something of theology, in the hope of settling her foolish and ignorant doubts as to her fitness for her new position.  No sooner did the thought occur to her than she set to work, like a young divinity student, to fit herself for her new calling.  Her father’s library contained a number of theological books, but these were of a kind that suited Mr. Dudley’s way of thinking rather than that of the early fathers.  As Esther