'She has found this out, and is going to exhort me as she tried to do to Lance,' thought Felix, as he desired that she should be admitted, and with some masculine perverseness, not only rose to greet her, but placed himself in a common upright chair to listen to her. He found himself mistaken, she had not come to speak to him on his own account.
'You are aware, Mr. Underwood, that from one cause and another, we have had some influence with dear Angela, more I fear than has been quite palatable.'
'In some ways you have done her a great deal of good,' said Felix, wondering what was coming.
'Nay, not pot-sherds like ourselves, but the way we have been privileged to point to her, dear child, but I am glad you think so. I fancied that you were all in opposition.'
'I think,' said Felix, 'that the poor child had got into a state of unreality and self-deceit, and that after the shock of last spring your kindness helped her to the true foundations which she had somehow missed.'
It must have been a temptation to Miss Isabella to enlarge on the danger of concealing that true Foundation, but she had a point and purpose, and besides, the Squire looked as little in need of being taught where to find that Verity as any one she had ever met in a biography, so she went on, 'It was, I am thankful to believe, true conversion, and the dear child is indeed a sincere Christian, but young people are so enthusiastic.'
'She is excitable, and sure to go to the utmost length in whatever she does,' said Felix, beginning to expect to hear of the ranting.
He was right. Miss Isabella wished him to be aware that she and her sisters had done their utmost to withhold Angela from rushing out. He replied that he was not afraid it would occur again. William Harewood had talked to the man, and thought him disconcerted, and likely to carry his ministrations where there was more neglect. However, Miss Hepburn explained that this was an offshoot of a great revival which the Plymouth brethren were organizing at Ewmouth. One of their great lights, a merchant captain who had given up everything for religion, was about to preach, and Angela had set her heart on hearing him. His tracts had been widely diffused among the Miss Hepburn's friends, and the warfare about disseminating them in the village was still recent. Angela, who had once made holocausts of as many as she could capture, was now their ardent admirer, and had insisted on making part of the audience of their author. Now the Miss Hepburns would as soon, no sooner, have gone to the opera as to a dissenting chapel, and there had been a vehement argument, resulting in their pupil declaring her intention of going with a farmer's widow who liberally hovered between Vale Leston Church one half of the day and Ewmouth chapel the other.
It was shocking to Clan Hepburn to think of forsaking the Establishment, and even more so to imagine an Underwood, a lady, a clergyman's daughter and sister, at a revivalist tea-meeting in a dissenting chapel, and in full council they had decided that it would be unjustifiable not to warn the head of the family, and absolutely conniving at the monstrous proceeding.
'Thank you sincerely,' said Felix: 'it shall be put a stop to.'