Agnes’s rambles out of doors had now almost always to be made alone. Rachel was much engrossed with the invalid of the Old Wood House, who had “taken a fancy” to the gentle little girl. The hypochondriac Miss Rivers was glad of any one so tender and respectful; and half in natural pity for the sufferings which Rachel could not believe to be fanciful, half from a natural vocation for kindly help and tendance, the girl was glad to respond to the partly selfish affection of her new friend, who told Rachel countless stories of the family, and the whole chronicle in every particular of her own early “disappointment in love.” In return, Rachel, by snatches, conveyed to her invalid friend—in whom, after all, she found some points of interest and congeniality—a very exalted ideal picture of the Athelings, the genius of Agnes, and the love-story of Marian. Marian and Agnes occupied a very prominent place indeed in the talk of that shadowy dressing-room, with all its invalid contrivances—its closed green blinds, its soft mossy carpets, on which no footstep was ever audible, its easy little couches, which you could move with a finger; the luxury, and the stillness, and the gossip, were not at all unpleasant to Rachel; and she read Hope Hazlewood to her companion in little bits, with pauses of talk between. Hope Hazlewood was not nearly romantic enough for the pretty faded invalid reposing among her pillows in her white dressing-gown, whom Time seemed to have forgotten there, and who had no recollection for her own part that she was growing old; but she took all the delight of a girl in hearing of Louis and Marian—how much attached to each other, and how handsome they both were.

And Marian Atheling did not care half so much as she used to do for the long rambles with her sister, which were once such a pleasure to both the girls. Marian rather now preferred sitting by herself over her needlework, or lingering alone at the window, in an entire sweet idleness, full of all those charmed visions with which the very name of Louis peopled all the fairy future. Not the wisest, or the wittiest, or the most brilliant conversation in the world could have half equalled to Marian the dreamy pleasure of her own meditations. So Agnes had to go out alone.

Agnes did not suffer very much from this necessity. She wandered along the skirts of the wood, with a vague sense of freedom and enjoyment not easy to explain in words. No dreamy trance of magic influence had come upon Agnes; her mind, and her heart, and her thoughts, were quickened by a certain thrill of expectation, which was not to be referred to the strange romance now going on in the family—to Charlie’s mission, nor Louis’s prospects, nor anything else which was definite and ascertained. She knew that her heart rose, that her mind brightened, that her thoughts were restless and light, and not to be controlled; but she could not tell the reason why. She went about exploring all the country byways, and finding little tracks among the brushwood undiscoverable to the common eye; and she was not cogitating anything, scarcely was thinking, but somehow felt within her whole nature a silent growth and increase not to be explained.

She was pondering along, with her eyes upon the wide panorama at her feet, when it chanced to Agnes, suddenly and without preparation, to encounter the Rector. These two young people, who were mutually attracted to each other, had at the present moment a mutual occasion of embarrassment and apparent offence. The Rector could not forget how very much humbled in his own opinion he himself had been on his late visit to the Lodge; he had not yet recovered the singular check given to his own unconscious selfishness, by the natural sympathy of these simple people with the grander primitive afflictions and sufferings of life: and he was not without an idea that Agnes looked upon him now with a somewhat disdainful eye. Agnes, on her part, was greatly oppressed by the secret sense of being concerned against the Rector; in his presence she felt like a culprit—a secret plotter against the hope which brightened his eye, and expanded his mind. A look of trouble came at once into her face; her brow clouded—she thought it was not quite honest to make a show of friendship, while she retained her secret knowledge of the inquiry which might change into all the bitterness of disappointment his sudden and unlooked-for hope.

He had been going in the opposite direction, but, though he was not at all reconciled to her, he was not willing either to part with Agnes. He turned, only half consciously, only half willingly, yet by an irresistible compulsion. He tried indifferent conversation, and so did she; but, in spite of himself, Lionel Rivers was a truer man with Agnes Atheling than he was with any other person in the world. He who had never cared for sympathy from any one, somehow or other felt a necessity for hers, and had a certain imperious disappointment and impatience when it was withheld from him, which was entirely unreasonable, and not to be accounted for. He broke off abruptly from the talk about nothing, to speak of some intended movements of his own.

“I am going to town,” said Mr Rivers. “I am somewhat unsettled at present in my intentions; after that, probably, I may spend some time abroad.”

“All because he is the heir!” thought Agnes to herself; and again she coloured with distress and vexation. It was impossible to keep something of this from her tone; when she spoke, it was in a voice subdued a little out of its usual tenor; but all that she asked was a casual question, meaning nothing—“If Mr Mead would have the duty while the Rector was away?”

“Yes,” said the Rector; “he is very much better fitted for it than I am. Here I have been cramping my wings these three years. Fathers and mothers are bitterly to blame; they bind a man to what his soul loathes, because it is his best method of earning some paltry pittance—so much a-year!”

After this exclamation the young clergyman made a pause, and so did his diffident and uneasy auditor, who “did not like” either to ask his meaning, or to make any comment upon it. After a few minutes he resumed again—

“I suppose it must constantly be so where we dare to think for ourselves,” he said, in a tone of self-conversation. “A man who thinks must come to conclusions different from those which are taught to him—different, perhaps, from all that has been concluded truest in the ages that are past. What shall we say? Woe be to me if I do not follow out my reasoning, to whatever length it may lead!”

“When Paul says, Woe be to him, it is, if he does not preach the Gospel,” said Agnes.

Mr Rivers smiled. “Be glad of your own happy exemption,” he said, turning to her, with the air of a man who knows by heart all the old arguments—all the feminine family arguments against scepticism and dangerous speculations. “I will leave you in possession of your beautiful Gospel—your pure faith. I shall not attempt to disturb your mind—do not fear.”

“You could not!” said Agnes, in a sudden and rash defiance. She turned to him in her turn, beginning to tremble a little with the excitement of controversy. She was a young polemic, rather more graceful in its manifestation, but quite as strong in the spirit of the conflict as any Mause Headrigg—which is to say, that, after her eager girlish fashion, she believed with her whole heart, and did not know what toleration meant.

Mr Rivers smiled once more. “I will not try,” he said. “I remember what Christ said, and endeavour to have charity even for those who condemn me.”

“Oh, Mr Rivers!” cried Agnes suddenly, and with trembling, “do not speak so coldly—do not say Christ; it sounds as if you did not care for Him—as if you thought He was no friend to you.”

The Rector paused, somewhat startled: it was an objection which never had occurred to him—one of those subtle touches concerning the spirit and not the letter, which, being perfectly sudden, and quite simple, had some chance of coming to the heart.

“What do you say?” he asked with a little interest.

Agnes’s voice was low, and trembled with reverence and with emotion. She was not thinking of him, in his maze of intellectual trifling—she was thinking of that Other, whom she knew so much better, and whose name she spoke. She answered with an involuntary bending of her head—“Our Lord.”

It was no conviction that struck the mind of the young man—conviction was not like to come readily to him—and he was far too familiar with all the formal arguments, to be moved by the reasonings of a polemic, or the fervour of an enthusiast. But he who professed so much anxiety about truth, and contemplated himself as a moral martyr, woefully following his principles, though they led him to ever so dark a desolation, had lived all his life among an infinite number of shams, and willingly enough had yielded to many of them. Perhaps this was the first time in his life in which he had been brought into immediate contact with people who were simply true in their feelings and their actions—whose opinions were without controversy—whose settled place in life, humble as it was, shut them out from secondary emulations and ambitions—and who were swayed by the primitive rule of human existence—the labour and the rest, the affliction and the prosperity, which were real things, and not creations of the brain. He paused a little over the words of Agnes Atheling. He did not want her to think as he did: he was content to believe that the old boundaries were suitable and seemly for a woman; and he was rather pleased than otherwise, by the horror, interest, and regret which such opinions as his generally met with. He paused upon her words, with the air of a spectator, and said in a meditative fashion, “It is a glorious faith.”

Now Agnes, who was not at all satisfied with this contemplative approval, was entirely ready and eager for controversy; prepared to plunge into it with the utmost rashness, utterly unaccoutred and ignorant as she was. She trembled with suppressed fervour and excitement over all her frame. She was as little a match for the Rector in the argument which she would fain have entered into, as any child in the village; but she was far too strong in the truth of her cause to feel any fear.

“Do you ever meet with great trouble?” said Agnes.

It was quite an unexpected question. The Rector looked at her inquiringly, without the least perception what she meant.

“And when you meet with it,” continued the eager young champion, “what do you say?”

Now this was rather a difficult point with the Rector; it was not naturally his vocation to administer comfort to “great trouble”—in reality, when he was brought face to face with it, he had nothing to say. He paused a little, really embarrassed—that was the curate’s share of the business. Mr Rivers was very sorry for the poor people, but had, in fact, no consolation to give, and thought it much more important to play with his own mind and faculties in this solemn and conscientious trifling of his, than to attend to the griefs of others. He answered, after some hesitation: “There are different minds, of course, and different influences applicable to them. Every man consoles himself after his own fashion; for some there are the sublime consolations of Philosophy, for others the rites of the Church.”

“Some time,” said Agnes suddenly, turning upon him with earnest eyes,—“some time, when you come upon great sorrow, will you try the name of our Lord?”

The young man was startled again, and made no answer. He was struck by the singular conviction that this girl, inferior to himself in every point, had a certain real and sublime acquaintance with that wonderful Person of whom she spoke; that this was by no means belief in a doctrine, but knowledge of a glorious and extraordinary Individual, whose history no unbeliever in the world has been able to divest of its original majesty. The idea was altogether new to him; it found an unaccustomed way to the heart of the speculatist—that dormant power which scarcely any one all his life had tried to reach to. “I do not quite understand you,” he said somewhat moodily; but he did not attend to what she said afterwards. He pondered upon the problem by himself, and could not make anything of it. Arguments about doctrines and beliefs were patent enough to the young man. He was quite at home among dogmas and opinions—but, somehow, this personal view of the question had a strange advantage over him. He was not prepared for it; its entire and obvious simplicity took away the ground from under his feet. It might be easy enough to persuade a man out of conviction of a doctrine which he believed, but it was a different matter to disturb the identity of a person whom he knew.