(Church-goers)
"Was the sermon so eloquent?" John Rossitter wondered. Certainly that listening, rapt face was—quite a common, little, wizen, old-maidish face, with nothing intellectual or noble about it, and yet transfigured into something like beauty with the brightness of a reflected light. Don't you know how sometimes a scrap of broken glass on a dust heap will catch the sunlight and shine with quite dazzling brilliancy, and how a little smutty raindrop in a London court will hold the sun and a gleaming changing rainbow in its little mirror?
CHAPTER III.
"Where does Miss Toosey live?" said John Rossitter on Monday morning. "I think I may as well go and call on her, as I have nothing else to do."
I do not know what impelled him to go. It is impossible to define motives accurately, even our own. We cannot say sometimes why we do a thing; every reason may be against it—common sense, habit, inclination, experience, duty, all may be pulling the other way, and yet we tear ourselves loose, and do the thing, urged by some invisible motive of whose existence we are hardly conscious. And if it is so in ourselves, how much more difficult to dissect other people's motives! and it is generally safer to leave the cause alone altogether, and only regard the effects produced. So it is enough to say that, on that Monday morning, Miss Toosey heard the rattle of wheels along North Street, and, looking out, saw the Rossitters' dog-cart and high-stepping chestnut mare, which, to her extreme surprise, stopped in front of her door.
"Something wrong with the harness," she concluded, as the little groom flew out and stood at the horse's head, with his arms crossed.
"Bless the child!" Miss Toosey said, "as if the creature could not have swallowed him at a mouthful, top-boots and all!"