came, the curate had done nothing but set the congregation by the ears;
and that he could not fail to receive as a weighty charge. But they told
him also that some of the principal dissenters declared him to be a
fountain of life in the place--and that seemed to him to involve the
worst accusation of all. For, without going so far as to hold, or even
say without meaning it, that dissenters ought to be burned, Mr. Bevis
regarded it as one of the first of merits, that a man should be a _good
churchman_.




CHAPTER IV.

THE RECTORY.


The curate had been in the study all the morning. Three times had his
wife softly turned the handle of his door, but finding it locked, had
re-turned the handle yet more softly, and departed noiselessly. Next
time she knocked--and he came to her pale-eyed, but his face almost
luminous, and a smile hovering about his lips: she knew then that either
a battle had been fought amongst the hills, and he had won, or a
thought-storm had been raging, through which at length had descended the
meek-eyed Peace. She looked in his face for a moment with silent
reverence, then offered her lips, took him by the hand, and, without a
word, led him down the stair to their mid-day meal. When that was over,
she made him lie down, and taking a novel, read him asleep. She woke him
to an early tea--not, however, after it, to return to his study: in the
drawing-room, beside his wife, he always got the germ of his