“That dress suggests good sound flesh and blood, with no remote divinity about it,” she thought. “Oh, I wish I could let things be, and stop poking about among mysteries. I will touch him to-night, yes, I will. I wonder—I wonder—if I can possibly muster up strength for a kiss.”
CHAPTER XXX.
Mrs. Fellowes, meanwhile, was having a most unsatisfactory time with the Park people; it seemed absolutely impossible to dig into them or to be of any service to them. They were wearing her to skin and bone, and she was meditating a change somewhere or other, when one day, crossing the hall just after lunch, she heard a knock at the door and opened it herself.
She found Mr. and Mrs. Waring standing in their normal attitude and looking frightfully embarrassed; she saw at a glance that they looked queerer than usual, and not feeling equal just at that minute to face them alone, she carried them straight off to the dining-room.
“Ah, the Nineteenth Century, I perceive,” said Mr. Waring as soon as he found himself in a chair, with his hat grasped in one hand and the other on the edge of his knee with the fingers stretched out and feeling nervously in a baulked way.
“In that last article of St. George Mivart’s,” continued Mr. Waring, “we find a marked evidence of the deteriorating effect of any special bias on a man’s mind. If this man were not an ardent churchman of the Romish persuasion I have always thought he might have done well in literary science, but as it is—it seems to me he has so much confused the thread of his discourse as to render it comparatively valueless by weaving into it, with most conscientious persistence, stray fragments of the deductions he has drawn from his own crude creed. This demands, on the reader’s part, a searching, sifting process, which the intrinsic value of the gentleman’s articles to my mind hardly warrants.”
“Ah, you like your science neat,” said the rector, “so possibly might I, if I had time to collect my own facts.”
“Ah, but for work that must last, time and an undivided mind are necessities, no matter what the cause may be that clouds the brain.”
He looked at his wife, and his floating, near-sighted eyes grew dim with tender pain, and the tendril-like movement of his fingers increased.
He forgot St. George Mivart, and all at once it occurred to him why he had come.