seated she could read his mind, as though it was open to her as a book.  She had been quite right when she had accused him of over-indulgence in his grief.  He did give way to it till it became a luxury to him—­a luxury which she would not have had the heart to deny him, had she not felt it to be of all luxuries the most pernicious.  During these long hours, in which he would sit speechless, doing nothing, he was telling himself from minute to minute that of all God’s creatures, he was the most heavily afflicted, and was revelling in the sense of the injustice done to him.  He was recalling all the facts of life, his education, which had been costly, and, as regarded knowledge, successful; his vocation to the Church, when in his youth he had determined to devote himself to the service of his Saviour, disregarding promotion or the favour of men; the short, sweet days of his early love, in which he had devoted himself again—­thinking nothing of self, but everything of her; his diligent working, in which he had ever done his very utmost for the parish in which he was placed, and always his best for the poorest; the success of other men who had been his compeers, and, as he too often told himself, intellectually his inferiors; then of his children, who had been carried off from his love to the churchyard—­over whose graves he himself had stood, reading out the pathetic words of the funeral service with unswerving voice and a bleeding heart; and then of his children still living, who loved their mother so much better than they loved him.  And he would recall the circumstances of their poverty—­how he had been driven to accept alms, to fly from creditors, to hide himself, to see his chairs and tables seized before the eyes of those over whom he had been set as their spiritual pastor.  And in it all, I think, there was nothing so bitter to the man as the derogation from the spiritual grandeur of his position as priest among men, which came as one necessary result from his poverty.  St Paul could go forth without money in his purse or shoes on his feet or two suits to his back, and his poverty never stood in the way of his preaching, or hindered the veneration of the faithful.  St Paul, indeed, was called upon to bear stripes, was flung into prison, encountered terrible dangers.  But Mr Crawley—­so he told himself—­could have encountered all that without flinching.  The stripes and scorn of the unfaithful would have been nothing to him, if only the faithful would have believed in him, poor as he was, as they would have believed in him had he been rich!  Even they whom he had most loved and treated him almost with derision, because he was now different from them.  Dean Arabin had laughed at him because he had persisted in walking ten miles through the mud instead of being conveyed in the dean’s carriage; and yet, after that, he had been driven to accept the dean’s charity!  No one respected him.  No one!  His very wife thought that he was a lunatic.  And now he had been publicly branded as a thief; and in all likelihood would end his days in a gaol!  Such were always his thoughts as he sat idle, silent, moody, over the fire; and his wife knew well their currents.  It would certainly be better that he should drive himself to some employment, if any employment could be found possible for him.