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sive like the dim house on the hill. The handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own ancestral estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe, or the village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he walked on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of his threefold dignity--as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden.
"It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house, and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business to hate him--not at all--rather to respect and sympathize with him. I provoke the fight--and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!"
A smile--contemptuous and good-humoured--crossed the Rector's face. Any angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a kind of shamefacedness--as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm, tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars and saints--like Renan in his queer envy of Théophile Gautier--when such men inevitably ask themselves whether they have not missed something irreplaceable, the student, by his learning--the saint even, by his goodness.
Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of which he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale moonshine, suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the village, the hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by giant firs.