The old man had stopped, taken off his hat, and turned toward her. He spoke with such a strange solemnity of voice that it could hardly have been believed his by those who knew him as a judge of horses and not as a reader of prayers. The other pair had stopped also.
"I should call it very hard," returned Juliet, "to come so near it and yet miss it."
"Especially to be driven so near it against one's will, and yet succeed in getting past without touching it," said the curate, with a flavor of asperity. His wife gently pinched his arm, and he was ashamed.
When they reached home, Juliet went straight to bed—or at least to her room for the night.
"I say, Wingfold," remarked the rector, as they sat alone after supper, "that sermon of yours was above your congregation."
"I am afraid you are right, sir. I am sorry. But if you had seen their faces as I did, perhaps you would have modified the conclusion."
"I am very glad I heard it, though," said the rector.
They had more talk, and when Wingfold went up stairs, he found Helen asleep. Annoyed with himself for having spoken harshly to Mrs. Faber, and more than usually harassed by a sense of failure in his sermon, he threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding and praying till the light began to appear. Out of the reeds shaken all night in the wind, rose with the morning this bird:—
THE SMOKE.
Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar,
But can not get the wood to burn;
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter,
And to the dark return.