Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete

								

in love ensued; it left on his mind and heart a sober and resigned
melancholy, which at length mellowed into content. His profession and
its sweet duties became more and more dear to him; in the hopes of the
next world he forgot the ambition of the present. He did not seek to
shine,--


"More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise."
His own birth made the poor his brothers, and their dispositions and
wants familiar to him. His own early errors made him tolerant to the
faults of others,--few men are charitable who remember not that they
have sinned. In our faults lie the germs of virtues. Thus gradually and
serenely had worn away his life--obscure but useful, calm but active,--a
man whom "the great prizes" of the Church might have rendered an
ambitious schemer, to whom a modest confidence gave the true pastoral
power,--to conquer the world within himself, and to sympathize with the
wants of others. Yes, he was a rare character, that village priest!

CHAPTER XII.


TOUT notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment.*--PASCAL.


*  "All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to sentiment."
LORD VARGRAVE, who had no desire to remain alone with the widow when the
guests were gone, arranged his departure for the same day as that fixed
for Mrs. Merton's; and as their road lay together for several miles,
it was settled that they should all dine at-----, whence Lord Vargrave
would proceed to London. Failing to procure a second chance-interview
with Evelyn, and afraid to demand a formal one--for he felt the
insecurity of the ground he stood on--Lord Vargrave, irritated and
somewhat mortified, sought, as was his habit, whatever amusement was in
his reach. In the conversation of Caroline Merton--shrewd, worldly, and
ambitious--he found the sort of plaything that he desired. They were
thrown much together; but to Vargrave, at least, there appeared no
danger in the intercourse; and perhaps his chief object was to pique
Evelyn, as well as to gratify his own spleen.
It was the evening before Evelyn's departure; the little party had been
for the last hour dispersed; Mrs. Merton was in her own room, making to
herself gratuitous and unnecessary occupation in seeing her woman pack
up. It was just the kind of task that delighted her. To sit in a large
chair and see somebody else at work--to say languidly, "Don't
crumple that scarf, Jane; and where shall we put Miss Caroline's blue
bonnet?"--gave her a very comfortable notion of her own importance
and habits of business,--a sort of title to be the superintendent of a
family and the wife of a rector. Caroline had disappeared, so had Lord
Vargrave; but the first was supposed to be with Evelyn, the second,
employed in writing letters,--at least, it was so when they had been
last observed. Mrs. Leslie was alone in the drawing-room, and absorbed
in anxious and benevolent thoughts on the critical situation of her
young favourite, about to enter an age and a world the perils of which