"Making haste to help and satisfy the world," Mr. Kirkbright said again.
"A river of clear water of life, coming down out of the throne," said Miss Euphrasia. "What a sign it is!"
Mr. Kirkbright walked along the margin of the ledge, farther and farther down. He tried with his stick some stones that lay across the current at a narrow point where beneath the opposite cliff it bent and turned away, losing itself from their sight as they stood here. Then he sprang across; crept, stooping, along the narrow foothold under the projecting rock, until he could follow with his eye the course of the rapid water, falling continually to its lower level as it sped on and on, all its volume gathered in one deep, rocky, unchangeable bed.
"What a waiting power!" he exclaimed, springing safely back, and coming up toward them. "What a stream for mills! And it turns nothing but the farmers' grists, till it gets to Tillington."
Desire was a very little disappointed at this utilitarianism. She had been so glad and satisfied with the reading of its type; the type of its far-back impulse.
"If there had been mills here, we should not have seen that," she said; forgetting to explain what.
But Christopher Kirkbright knew.
"What was it that we did see?" he asked, coming beside her.
"The gracious hurry," she answered, with a half-vexed surprise in her eyes.
"And what is the next thing to seeing that? Isn't it to partake? To be in a gracious hurry also, if we can?"