grateful heart of our Christian Hero
overflowed. He pressed my hands alternately to
his lips. Overwhelmed by the exquisite triumph
of having got him back among us, I let him do
what he liked with my hands. I closed my eyes.
I felt my head, in an ecstasy of spiritual self-
forgetfulness, sinking on his shoulder. In a moment
more I should certainly have swooned away in
his arms, but for an interruption from the
outer world, which brought me to myself again.
A horrid rattling of knives and forks sounded
outside the door, and the footman came in to
lay the table for luncheon.

Mr. Godfrey started up, and looked at the
clock on the mantel-piece.

"How time flies with you!" he exclaimed.
"I shall barely catch the train."

I ventured on asking why he was in such a
hurry to get back to town. His answer
reminded me of family difficulties that were still
to be reconciled, and of family disagreements
that were yet to come.

"I have heard from my father," he said.
"Business obliges him to leave Frizinghall for
London today, and he proposes coming on
here, either this evening or tomorrow. I must
tell him what has happened between Rachel
and me. His heart is set on our marriage—
there will be great difficulty, I fear, in
reconciling him to the breaking-off of the engagement.
I must stop him, for all our sakes,
from coming here till he is reconciled. Best
and dearest of friends, we shall meet again!"

With those words he hurried out. In equal
haste on my side, I ran upstairs to compose
myself in my own room before meeting Aunt
Ablewhite and Rachel at the luncheon-table.

I am well aware—to dwell for a moment
yet on the subject of Mr. Godfrey—that the
all-profaning opinion of the world has charged
him with having his own private reasons for
releasing Rachel from her engagement, at the
first opportunity she gave him. It has also
reached my ears, that his anxiety to recover his
place in my estimation has been attributed, in
certain quarters, to a mercenary eagerness to
make his peace (through me) with a venerable
committee-woman at the Mothers'- Small-
Clothes, abundantly blessed with the goods of
this world, and a beloved and intimate friend of
my own. I only notice these odious slanders
for the sake of declaring that they never had a
moment's influence on my mind. In obedience
to my instructions, I have exhibited the fluctuations
in my opinion of our Christian Hero,
exactly as I find them recorded in my diary.
In justice to myself, let me here add that, once
reinstated in his place in my estimation, my
gifted friend never lost that place again. I
write with the tears in my eyes, burning to say
more. But no, I am cruelly limited to my
actual experience of persons and things. In
less than a month from the time of which I am
now writing, events in the money-market (which
diminished even my miserable little income)
forced me into foreign exile, and left me with
nothing but a loving remembrance of Mr.
Godfrey which the slander of the world has
assailed, and assailed in vain.

Let me dry my eyes, and return to my
narrative.

I went downstairs to luncheon, naturally
anxious to see how Rachel was affected by her
release from her marriage engagement.

It appeared to me—but I own I am a poor
authority in such matters—that the recovery of
her freedom had set her thinking again of that
other man whom she loved, and that she was
furious with herself for not being able to control
a revulsion of feeling of which she was secretly
ashamed. Who was the man? I had my
suspicions but it was needless to waste time
in idle speculation. When I had converted
her, she would, as a matter of course, have no
concealments from me. I should hear all about
the man; I should hear all about the
Moonstone. If I had had no higher object in stirring
her up to a sense of spiritual things, the motive
of relieving her mind of its guilty secrets would
have been enough of itself to encourage me to
go on.

Aunt Ablewhite took her exercise in the
afternoon in an invalid chair. Rachel
accompanied her. "I wish I could drag the chair,"
she broke out, recklessly. "I wish I could
fatigue myself till I was ready to drop!"

She was in the same humour in the evening.
I discovered in one of my friend's precious
publications—The Life, Letters, and Labours of
Miss Jane Ann Stamper, forty-fifth edition—
passages which bore with a marvellous
appropriateness on Rachel's present position. Upon
my proposing to read them, she went to the
piano. Conceive how little she must have
known of serious people, if she supposed that
my patience was to be exhausted in that way!
I kept Miss Jane Ann Stamper by me, and
waited for events with the most unfaltering
trust in the future.

Old Mr. Ablewhite never made his appearance
that night. But I knew the importance which
his worldly greed attached to his son's marriage
with Miss Verinder—and I felt a positive
conviction (do what Mr. Godfrey might to prevent
it) that we should see him the next day. With
his interference in the matter, the storm on
which I had counted would certainly come, and
the salutary exhaustion of Rachel's resisting
powers would as certainly follow. I am not
ignorant that old Mr. Ablewhite has the reputation
generally (especially among his inferiors)
of being a remarkably good-natured man.
According to my observation of him, he deserves
his reputation as long as he has his own way,
and not a moment longer.

The next day, exactly as I had foreseen,
Aunt Ablewhite was as near to being astonished
as her nature would permit, by the sudden
appearance of her husband. He had barely been
a minute in the house, before he was followed,
to my astonishment this time, by an unexpected
complication, in the shape of Mr. Bruff.

I never remember feeling the presence of the