He rates me as a merchant does the wares

He will not purchase — ‘quality not high I—

’Twill lose its colour opened to the sun,

Has no aroma, and, in fine, is naught —

I barter not for such commodities —

There is no ratio betwixt sand and gems.’

’Tis wicked judgment! for the soul can grovv,

As embryos, that live and move but blindly,

Burst from the dark, emerge regenerate,

And lead a life of vision and of choice.

ESTHER did not take the carriage into Malthouse Lane, but left it to wait for her outside the town; and when she entered the house she put her finger on her lip to Lyddy and ran lightly upstairs. She wished to surprise her father by this visit, and she succeeded. The little minister was just then almost surrounded by a wall of books, with merely his head peeping above them, being much embarrassed to find a substitute for tables and desks on which to arrange the volumes he kept open for reference. He was absorbed in mastering all those painstaking interpretations of the Book of Daniel, which are by this time well gone to the limbo of mistaken criticism; and Esther, as she opened the door softly, heard him rehearsing aloud a passage in which he declared, with some parenthetic provisoes, that he conceived not how a perverse ingenuity could blunt the edge of prophetic explicitness, or how an open mind could fail to see in the chronology of ‘the little horn’ the resplendent lamp of an inspired symbol searching out the germinal growth of an antichristian power.

‘You will not like me to interrupt you, father?’ said Esther slyly.

‘Ah, my beloved child!’ he exclaimed, upsetting a pile of books, and thus unintentionally making a convenient breach in his wall, through which Esther could get up to him and kiss him. ‘Thy appearing is as a joy despaired of. I had thought of thee as the blinded think of the daylight — which indeed is a thing to rejoice in, like all other good, though we see it not nigh.’

‘Are you sure you have been as well and comfortable as you said you were in your letters?’ said Esther, seating herself close in front of her father, and laying her hand on his shoulder.

‘I wrote truly, my dear, according to my knowledge at the time. But to an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep. It seems now that all has been as usual, except my studies, which have gone somewhat curiously into prophetic history. But I fear you will rebuke me for my negligent apparel,’ said the little man, feeling in front of Esther’s brightness like a bat overtaken by the morning.

‘That is Lyddy’s fault, who sits crying over her want of Christian assurance instead of brushing your clothes and putting out your clean cravat. She is always saying her righteousness is filthy rags, and really I don’t think that is a very strong expression for it. I’m sure it is dusty clothes and furniture.’

‘Nay, my dear, your playfulness glances too severely on our faithful Lyddy. Doubtless I am myself deficient, in that I do not aid her infirm memory by admonition. But now tell me aught that you have left untold about yourself Your heart has gone out somewhat towards this family — the old man and the child, whom I had not reckoned of?’

‘Yes, father. It is more and more difficult to me to see how I can make up my mind to disturb these people at all.’

‘Something should doubtless be devised to lighten the loss and the change to the aged father and mother. I would have you in any case seek to temper a vicissitude, which is nevertheless a providential arrangement not to be wholly set aside.’

‘Do you think, father — do you feel assured that a case of inheritance like this of mine is a sort of providential arrangement that makes a command?’

‘I have so held it,’ said Mr Lyon, solemnly; ‘in all my meditations I have so held it. For you have to consider, my dear, that you have been led by a peculiar path, and into experience which is not ordinarily the lot of those who are seated in high places; and what I have hinted to you already in my letters on this head, I shall wish on a future opportunity to enter into more at large.’

Esther was uneasily silent. On this great question of her lot she saw doubts and difficulties, in which it seemed as if her father could not help her. There was no illumination for her in this theory of providential arrangement. She said suddenly (what she had not thought of at all suddenly) —

‘Have you been again to see Felix Holt, father? You have not mentioned him in your letters.’

‘I have been since I last wrote, my dear, and I took his mother with me, who, I fear, made the time heavy to him with her plaints. But afterwards I carried her away to the house of a brother minister of Loamford, and returned to Felix, and then we had much discourse.’

‘Did you tell him of everything that has happened — I mean about me — about the Transomes?’

‘Assuredly I told him, and he listened as one astonished. For he had much to hear, knowing nought of your birth, and that you had any other father than Rufus Lyon. ’Tis a narrative I trust I shall not be called on to give to others; but I was not without satisfaction in unfolding the truth to this young man, who hath wrought himself into my affection strangely — I would fain hope for ends that will be a visible good in his less way-worn life, when mine shall be no longer.’

‘And you told him how the Transomes had come, and that I was staying at Transome Court?’

‘Yes, I told these things with some particularity, as is my wont concerning what hath imprinted itself on my mind.’ ‘What did Felix say?’

‘Truly, my dear, nothing desirable to recite,’ said Mr Lyon, rubbing his hand over his brow.

‘Dear father, he did say something, and you always remember what people say. Pray tell me; I want to know.’

‘It was a hasty remark, and rather escaped him than was consciously framed. He said, “Then she will marry Transome; that is what Transome means.” ’

‘That was all............