When he had talked thus for some time Sophia answered, and he knew instantly, from the tone of her voice, that her tears had dried themselves.

“Are you and I able to understand the condition of heart that is not only resigned, but eager to meet Him Whom they hope to meet—­able so fully to understand that we can judge its worth?”

He knew her face so well that he seemed to see the hint of sarcasm come in the arching of her handsome eyebrows as she spoke.

“I fear they realise their hope but little,” he replied.  “The excitement of some hysterical outbreak is what they seek.”

“It seems to me that is an ungenerous and superficial view, especially as we have never seen the same people courting hysterics before,” she said; but she did not speak as if she cared much which view he took.

Her lack of interest in his opinion, quite as much as her frank reproof, offended him.  They walked in silence for some minutes.  Thunder, which had been rumbling in the distance, came nearer and every now and then a flash from an approaching storm lit up the dark land with a pale, vivid light.

“Even setting their motives at the highest estimate,” he said, “I do not know that you, or even I, Miss Rexford, need hold ourselves incapable of entering into them.”  This was not exactly what he would have felt if left to himself, but it was what her upbraiding wrung from him.  He continued:  “Even if we had the sure expectation for to-night that they profess to have, I am of opinion that we should express our devotion better by patient adherence to our ordinary duties, by doing all we could for the world up to the moment of His appearing.”

“Our ordinary duties!” she cried; “they are always with us!  I dare say you and I might think that the fervour of this night’s work had better have been converted into good works and given to the poor; but our opinion is not specially likely to be the true one.  What do we know?  Walking here in the dark, we can’t even see our way along this road.”

It was an apt illustration, for their eyes were becoming so dazzled by the occasional lightning that they could make no use of its brief flash, or of the faint light of night that was mingled in the darkness of the intervals.

Although he smarted under the slight she put upon him, he was weary of opposing her, because he loved her.  “I am sorry that nothing I say meets with your approval,” he said sadly.

It was lack of tact that made him use the personal tone when he and she had so far to travel perforce together, and she, being excited and much perturbed in spirit, had not the grace to answer wisely.

“Happily it matters little whether what you say pleases me or not.”

She meant in earnestness to depreciate herself, and to exalt that higher tribunal before which all opinions are arraigned; still, there was in the answer a tinge of spite, telling him by the way that it did not distress her to differ with him.  It was not wonderful that Trenholme, self-conscious with the love she did not guess at, took the words only as a challenge to his admiration.