 she heard every
week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard him at
all.
    »I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do,« she
remarked as a safe generality. »It is often a great sorrow to me.«
    She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his father
could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she did not know
whether her principles were High, Low, or Broad. He himself knew that, in
reality, the confused beliefs which she held, apparently imbibed in childhood,
were, if any thing, Tractarian as to phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence.
Confused or otherwise, to disturb them was his last desire:
 
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
 
He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but he gladly
conformed to it now.
    He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode of
life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the undulations
disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead after another he
followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down the milk.
    »I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in,« she ventured to
observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of herself.
    »Yes - well, my father has been talking a good deal to me of his troubles
and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress me. He is so zealous
that he gets many snubs and buffetings from people of a different way of
thinking from himself, and I don't like to hear of such humiliations to a man of
his age, the more particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when
carried so far. He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which he
took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some missionary society to
preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and
made it his business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere
about there - son of some landowner up that way - and who has a mother afflicted
with blindness. My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and
there was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I must say, to
intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the probabilities were so obvious
that
