s it likely that in a sleepy Midland town, such as Eastthorpe, knowing nothing but the common respectabilities of the middle of this century, the daughter of an ironmonger would fall in love

sts. But Eastthorpe, when Mr. Cardew was at Abchurch, was totally different. It knew what it was for parsons to go wrong. It had not forgotten a former rector and the young woman at the Bell. What talk there was about that affair! Happily his friends were wel

e Reverend Charles Berdoe, M.A., and Euphemia, her dearest friend. Mrs. Cardew had heard so much of the contamination of boys' schools that Theophilus was educated at home and sent straight from home to Cambridge. At the University he became a member of the ultra-evangelical sect of young men there, and devoted himself entirely to theology. He thus passed through youth and early manhood without any intercourse with the world so called, and he lacked that wholesome influence which is exercised by healthy companionship with those who diffe

or life, and his joys and sorrows were not those of Abchurch, but of another sphere. Abchurch feared wet weather, drought, ague, rheumatism, loss of money, and, on Sundays, feared hell, but Mr. Cardew's fears were spiritual or even spectral. His self-communion produced one strange and perilous result, a habit of prolonged evolution from particular ideas uncorrected by reference to what was around him. If anything struck him it remained with him, deduction followed deduction in practice unfortunately as well as in thought, and he was ultimately landed in absurdity or something worse. The wholesome influence of o

ether she be bound or free. It cannot be helped; there is no reason why we should try to help it, provided only we do no harm to others, and indeed these delicate threads are the very fairest in the tissue of life. With Mr. Cardew it was a little different. Undoubtedly he was drawn to Catharine because her thoughts were his thoughts. St. Paul and Milton in him saluted St. Paul and Milton in her. But he did not know where to stop, nor could he look round and realise whither he was being led. Any other person in six weeks would have noticed the milestones on the road, and w

stery of things, and there would have been ample room for emotion. How impatient she became of those bars which nowadays restrain people from coming close to one another! Often and often she felt that she could have leaped out towards the person talking to her, that she could have cried to him to put away his circumlocutions, his forms and his trivialities, and to let her see and feel what he really was. Often she knew what it was to thirst like one in a desert for human intercourse, and she marvelled how those who pretended to care for her could stay away so long: she could have humiliated herself if only they would have permitted her to love them and be near them. Poor Catharine! the world as it is now is no place for people so framed! When life runs high and takes a common form men can walk together as the disciples walked on the road to Emmaus. Christian and Hopeful can pour out their hearts to one another as they travel towards the Celestial City and are knit together in everlasting bonds by the same Christ and the same salvation. But when each man is left to shift for himself, to work out

opiate in suppressing sensibility. She was, however, in Eastthorpe before the new education, as it is called, had been invented. There was no elaborate system of needle points, Roman and Greek history, plain and spherical trigonometry, political economy, ethics, literature, chemistry, co

most extravagant and personal emotions. As it was, her position was critical because she stood by herself, affiliated to nothing, an individual belonging to no species, so far as she knew. She then met Mr. Cardew. It was through him the word was spoken to her, and he was the interpreter of the new world to her. She was in love with him - but what is love? There is no such thing: there are loves, and they are all different. Catharine's was the very life of all that was Catharine, senses,

er and not from him. It was she and not he who watched through the night and found no m