DEAR MRS. LAKE,
I am sorry to say I am prevented from joining you to-night.
Yours, with great regret,
A.M. UNDERWOOD.
She showed the billet to Felix, who made no objection, but rang, and gave orders for its despatch.
'Thank you, Angel,' he said. 'I do not scruple to avail myself of your consideration for my side, because, as long as my authority over you lasts, I am resolved to prevent you by any means in my power from doing wrong.'
'You know I have ceased to think with you on that point,' said Angela, not without hopes of extorting permission after all.
'I know you have, but you are young enough to be prevented from committing an open act of schism before you have grown wiser.'
'You speak as if I wanted to become an out-and-out dissenter, when I only wish to hear a man whose writings have done so much for my soul, which was starving—yes, starving before.'
'Perhaps sleeping would be the fitter word.'
'Sleeping or starving, it comes to the same. Forms, routine, and ordinances assumed to be everything, and did me no good—how could they? And in the awakening! Oh, brother, would that I could make you understand the joy—the ecstasy of looking straight up to my Saviour, and the incomparableness of what brightens and quickens that gaze. Then you could never try to keep me back for mere forms and distinctions!'
'Nay,' said Felix, gravely but fervently, 'it is because I do—I hope—love and look up to my most blessed Lord and Master, that I can permit nothing that rends and breaks the Unity of His Body, which He gave us to guard and cherish here.'
'Unity is not external—it is only in the spiritual Church of the faithful, in their hearts. It is I who want to keep it.'