though
- you don't read Shakspeare, Mr Lyon.«
    »I am bound to confess that I have so far looked into a volume of Esther's
as to conceive your meaning; but the fantasies therein were so little to be
reconciled with a steady contemplation of that divine economy which is hidden
from sense and revealed to faith, that I forbore the reading, as likely to
perturb my ministrations.«
    Esther sat by in unusual silence. The conviction that Felix willed her
exclusion from his life was making it plain that something more than friendship
between them was not so thoroughly out of the question as she had always
inwardly asserted. In her pain that his choice lay aloof from her, she was
compelled frankly to admit to herself the longing that it had been otherwise,
and that he had entreated her to share his difficult life. He was like no one
else to her: he had seemed to bring at once a law, and the love that gave
strength to obey the law. Yet the next moment, stung by his independence of her,
she denied that she loved him; she had only longed for a moral support under the
negations of her life. If she were not to have that support, all effort seemed
useless.
    Esther had been so long used to hear the formulas of her father's belief
without feeling or understanding them, that they had lost all power to touch
her. The first religious experience of her life - the first self-questioning,
the first voluntary subjection, the first longing to acquire the strength of
greater motives and obey the more strenuous rule - had come to her through Felix
Holt. No wonder that she felt as if the loss of him were inevitable backsliding.
    But was it certain that she should lose him? She did not believe that he was
really indifferent to her.
 

                                   Chapter 28

 »TITUS. But what says Jupiter, I ask thee?
 CLOWN. Alas, sir, I know not Jupiter:
 I never drank with him in all my life.«
                                                               Titus Andronicus.
 
The multiplication of uncomplimentary placards noticed by Mr Lyon and Felix Holt
was one of several signs that the days of nomination and election were
approaching. The presence of the revising barrister in Treby was not only an
opportunity for all persons not otherwise busy to show their zeal for the
purification of the voting-lists, but also to reconcile private ease and public
duty by standing about the streets and lounging at doors.
    It was no light business for Trebians to form an opinion; the mere fact of a
public functionary with an unfamiliar title was enough to give them pause,