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Updated: May 31, 2025
To have seen the stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme's eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time entirely robbed him of the power of seeing the elements of life in that proportion to which his mind's eye had grown accustomed that is, seeing the things of religion as a shadowy background for life's important activities.
The murmurs of an undecided conscience seldom take the form of definite self-accusation. They did not now; and Trenholme's suspicion that he was in the wrong only obtruded itself in the irritating perception that his trouble had a ludicrous side.
She went into the young spruce fringes of the wood near the Rexford pasture, and sat down where she had before sat to watch Principal Trenholme's house. The leaves of the elm above her were turning yellow; the sun-laden wind that came between the spruce shades seemed chill to her; she felt cold, an unusual thing for her, and the time seemed terribly long.
In her own way, she had summed up the characteristics of the two men with one of whom marriage had been at least a possibility. Hilton she feared and Robert she despised, so if either was to become her husband, it would be Hilton. But five minutes of John Trenholme's companionship had given her a standard by which to measure her suitors, and both fell wofully short of its demands.
Had the move from the Old World to this the decision in which she had rashly aided with youthful advice been a good or a bad thing for him and for the people to whom he had come? From this she fell a-thinking upon her own life as, in the light of Trenholme's letter, the contrast of her present womanly self with the bright, audacious girl of that past time was set strongly before her.
"Look here," said Trenholme, "don't go out." Again he put his hand strongly on his visitor, and again he was quietly brushed aside. The outside seemed so terribly cold and dark and desolate for this poor old man to wander in, that Trenholme was sorry he should go. Yet go he did, opening the door and shutting it behind him. Trenholme's greatcoat, cap, and snow-shoes were hanging against the wall.
A fist it was assuredly, and a hard one; but it smote no pillow. With a gurgling cough, Robert Fenley toppled headlong to the edge of the lake, and lay there probably some minutes, for the man who had hit him knew how and where to strike. Sylvia did not scream. She had recognized Trenholme's voice, but she felt absurdly like fainting.
Eliza went quietly down the lane again, in shadow of the lilac hedge, and let herself out of the wooden gate; but she did not return to the village. She looked down the road the other way, measuring with her eyes the distance to the roof of Trenholme's house.
As Sophia worked with the children the turmoil of her thought went on. Something constantly stung her pride like the lash of a whip; she turned and shifted her mind to avoid it, and could not. She had deliberately deceived her friends when she had asserted that her uncle had known all Trenholme's affairs.
Portly men, who a week before would have thought themselves compromised by giving a serious thought to the narrative, now stood still in the street to get the chance of hearing the preacher, and felt that in doing so they were wrapped in all the respectability of the cloth of Trenholme's coats, and standing firm on the letters of his Oxford degree and upon all the learning of the New College.
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