"Oh, thank you. I did not know what it was that was such a nuisance."

"This is too much glare. Let me turn your sofa a little way round from

it."

And as he did so, and she raised herself, he shook out her cushions,

and substituted a cool chintz covered one for the hot crimson damask on

which her head had been resting. "Thank you! How do you know so well?"

she said with a long breath of satisfaction.

"By long trial," he said, very quietly seating himself beside her couch,

with a stillness of manner that strangely hushed all her throbbings;

and the very pleasure of lying really still was such that she did not

at once break it. The lull of these few moments was inexpressibly sweet,

but the pang that had crossed her so many times in the last two days and

nights could not but return. She moved restlessly, and he leant towards

her with a soft-toned inquiry what it was she wanted.

"Don't," she said, raising herself. "No, don't! I have thought more

over what you said," she continued, as if repeating the sentence she

had conned over to herself. "You have been most generous, most noble;

but--but," with an effort of memory, "it would be wrong in me to accept

such--oh! such a sacrifice; and when I tell you all, you will think it

a duty to turn from me," she added, pressing her hands to her temples.

"And mind, you are not committed--you are free."

"Tell me," he said, bending towards her.

"I know you cannot overlook it! My faith--it is all confusion," she said

in a low awe-struck voice. "I do believe--I do wish to believe; but my

grasp seems gone. I cannot rest or trust for thinking of the questions

that have been raised! There," she added in a strange interrogative

tone.

"It is a cruel thing to represent doubt as the sign of intellect," Alick

said sadly; "but you will shake off the tormentors when the power of

thinking and reasoning is come back."

"Oh, if I could think so! The misery of darkness

here--there--everywhere--the old implicit reliance gone, and all

observance seeming like hypocrisy and unreality. There is no thinking,

no enduring the intolerable maze."

"Do not try to think now. You cannot bear it. We will try to face what

difficulties remain when you are stronger."

She turned her eyes full on him. "You do not turn away! You know you are

free."

"Turn from the sincerity that I prize?"

"You don't? I thought your views were exactly what would make you hate

and loathe such bewilderment, and call it wilful;" there was something

piteous in the way her eye sought his face.

"It was not wilful," he said; "it came of honest truth-seeking. And,

Rachel, I think the one thing is now gone that kept that honesty from

finding its way."




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