“That I will, indeed!” said Aubrey, clasping the hand of the ejected minister. Then, with a sudden and complete change of tone,—“But, maybe, if you knew all I know, you were not over ready to acknowledge me.”
“You are in trouble, my friend,” answered Mr Marshall sympathisingly. “Can I help you thereout? At least I can feel for you in it, if I may do no more.”
There was another minute of dead silence. The next question came suddenly and bluntly.
“Mr Marshall, did you ever in your life feel that you had been a grand fool?”
“Yes,” was the short, quiet answer.
“I am glad to hear it, though I should not have thought so. I thought you had always been a precisely proper person, and I did not suppose you could feel for me a whit. But I must tell my trouble to somebody, or I shall grow desperate. Look you, I have lost my place, and I can get none other, and I have not twenty pounds in the world, and I owe an hundred pounds, and I can’t go home.”
“Thank God!” was the strange answer.
“Well, to be sure,—Mr Marshall, what on earth are you thanking God for?”
“That your husks have lost their flavour, my son. So long as the prodigal finds the husks sweet, there is little hope of him. But let him once discover that they are dry husks, and not sweet fruits, and that his companions are swine, and not princes—then he is coming to himself, and there is hope of making a man of him again. I say therefore, Thank God!”
“I shall never make anything better than a fool.”