"Pray forgive me!" said Mrs. Pusey's voice at her side. "Shall we go past Oriel; it is shortest. No doubt we shall encounter Edward on his way to meet us, if Cathedral is over, as I should guess it to be. Then we might perhaps take a turn in the Broad Walk. It will do Edward good, for his health is so precarious just now that I do not know how he is to get on to the end of term."
As Horatia murmured her sympathy the two gowns disappeared under Oriel gateway.
"Where dwellest Thou?" All through the remainder of the day the question persisted, wrecking everything she did in the pleasant, dignified atmosphere of Mr. Pusey's house. Were these kind, learned people who sat round the Sunday dinner-table, were they the captives of His love; had they been loosed from sin? She wished that Tristram could have been there, sitting opposite to her. His familiar presence would have steadied her. Even if he knew the meaning of all these phrases there was nothing disturbing about him.
Later in the afternoon she watched Mr. Newman, the friend of the family, sitting with the two elder children on his knee, while he put his spectacles on their noses, or told them a story. What would happen if she suddenly interrupted the story with her insistent question—"Do you know where He dwells?"
The interminable day came to an end at last, and she was alone in her room. Without waiting to undress she flung herself down beside the bed. "Where dwellest Thou, where dwellest Thou?" There was no one to answer, nothing to see, only the rose and jasmine of the wall-paper, distorted through the rain of tears.
She woke next morning in a very different frame of mind, more than a little ashamed of her emotion of the day before. She might have been a Methodist! It was not for her, this enthusiasm, and she ought not to have been so discomposed. To have been carried away, against her will, by the words of a man whom she disliked! She disliked, too, some of what he had said, now that more of it came back to her. Life was made for happiness; though sorrow intruded it was an incident to be forgotten, not to be dwelt upon. Comfortably eating her breakfast in her well-appointed room she felt sure of this, and knew that she, who was certainly not ignorant of suffering, did not approve of its glorification. What did Mr. Dormer know about it?
And yet ... she knew that she should not forget St. Mary's.
CHAPTER VIII
(1)
Mr. Dormer of Oriel was accustomed to assert that he felt no ill effects from his Italian carriage accident, but, as a matter of fact, he never went up or down any prolonged flight of stairs without being reminded of the slight muscular weakness which it had left. So that when, about six weeks after his sermon at St. Mary's, he came rather fast down the sixty-five steps of the Bodleian library, and at the end of every group of five arrived with some force upon his injured leg, he was so reminded.