What is it about some people that, in spite of ourselves, they thus force out of us the best part of our nature; that base and unworthy thoughts cannot live in us before them,—­that they melt out of our hearts as the snow before the rays of the sun?  Even though the effect may be transient, such is the power of their faith, and their truth, and their goodness, that it must needs call forth in us something of the same spirit as their own.

Such was Eustace Daintree’s influence over Vera.  It was not because of his office, for no one was less susceptible than Vera—­a Protestant brought up, with but vague ideas of her own faith, in a Catholic land—­to any of those recognized associations with which a purely English-bred girl might have felt the character of the clergyman of the parish where she lived to be invested.  It was nothing of that sort that made him great to her; it was, simply and solely, the goodness of the man that impressed her.  His guilelessness, his simplicity of mind, his absolute uprightness of character, and, with it all, the absence in him of any assumption of authority, or of any superiority of character over those about him.  His very humility made her humble with him, and exalted him into something saintly in her eyes.

When Eustace looked at her fixedly, with all his good soul in his earnest eyes, and said to her again, “Do you love him, Vera?” Vera could but answer him simply and frankly, almost against her will, as it were.

“I don’t think I do, Eustace; but then I do not quite know what love is.  I do not think, however, that it can be what I feel.”

“My child, no union can be hallowed without love.  Vera, you will not run into so great a danger?” he said anxiously.

She looked up at him smiling.

“I like him better than any one else, at all events.  Better than Mr. Gisburne, for instance.  And I think, I do really think, Eustace, it will be for my happiness.”

The vicar looked grave.  “If Sir John Kynaston were a poor man, would you marry him?”

And Vera answered bravely, though with a heightened colour—­

“No; but it is not only for the money, Eustace; indeed it is not.  But—­but—­I should be miserable without it; and I must do something with my life.”

He drew her near to him, and kissed her forehead.  He understood her.  With that rare gift of sympathy—­the highest, the most God-like of all human attributes—­he felt at once what she meant.  It was wonderful that this man, who was so unworldly, so unselfish, so pure of the stains of earth himself, should have seen at once her position from her own point of view; that was neither a very exalted one, nor was it very free from the dross of worldliness.  But it was so.  All at once he seemed to know by a subtle instinct what were the weaknesses, and the temptations, and the aims of this girl, who, with all her faults, was so dear to him.  He understood her better, perhaps, than she understood herself.  Her soul was untouched by passion; the story of her life was unwritten; there was no danger for her yet; and perchance it might be that the storms of life would pass her by unscathed, and that she might remain sheltered for ever in the safe haven which had opened so unexpectedly to receive her.