Priscilla's beauty was of that shadowy and spiritual kind that it took a good while to find out that she was a beauty at all. Certainly Priscilla's sisters, the Misses Mildmay, had sublime faith in Priscilla's charms; but the poor girl herself had spent so much of her twenty-five years of life trying to conform to the standard of behavior inculcated in the Misses Mildmay's boarding and day school for young ladies and little girls that it had robbed her of that delicious and ingenuous vanity which is the glorious inheritance of pretty young things of her gender. The Misses Mildmay lived in an imposing four-story brick mansion in a street of the sternest respectability; there was not a suspicion of the shop in the stately front door, and the heavily draped windows bore no advertising sign. The tall man-servant who opened the door was loftily oblivious to the pupils who sneaked in by the garden way. The Misses Mildmay had made money in their school—and it was all for Priscilla. Had this youngest birdling in the dove-cote been like her elder sisters, nothing could have been better contrived than the scheme of happi
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ness proposed to her. But unfortunately Priscilla was no more a Mildmay than she was a Montmorency or a Condé. It is true that she conformed outwardly to the Mildmay model, but Nature's original Priscilla was a merry, fiery young creature with peachy cheeks and a perpetual smile and a good appetite. All these things, however, were kept in abeyance—particularly her color and her appetite. Had that dignified footman been cut up into juicy chops for Priscilla's breakfast, and that mahogany door been made into rich soups for Priscilla's dinner, she would no doubt have lost some of that pretty pallor, that pathetic look out of her dark eyes. But the income of the Misses Mildmay did not admit of the footman and the mahogany door and the juicy chops and rich soups too, so they skimped on the dinners, skimped on the amusements, skimped on all those vanities that had never had any charms for them, but which Mother Nature, who is obstinate as well as perverse, had meant for the younger sister.
The Mildmay religion was necessarily of a well-bred and repressive type; but Priscilla was given to getting up early and walking long distances to a church in East Harrowby, where not one single person could be found who might be called "in society" except Priscilla herself. The clergyman, it is true, was a gentleman, but he was said to be so cold, so stern, so unsocial, that he strongly repelled his own class. There was, however, a reason for the Rev. Mr. Thorburn's indifference to general society. He had met with the most awful of
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 domestic calamities. The wife whom he loved had lost her mind, and was then in a private asylum. The only shifting of his burden that the stern Mr. Thorburn showed was, he had given up the charge which he had held for ten years, and where his happy married life had been spent, and had taken a very small and pitifully poor church in East Harrowby. His congregation was made up entirely of working people, to Mr. Thorburn's intense satisfaction. He had the spirit of an apostle, but he was handicapped by his temperament and by the traditions of his class. He could not be persistent, or aggressive, or personally solicitous about the highly educated, moral, and well-bred persons who made up his first congregation. He desired earnestly and even fiercely to wake them up to a spiritual life, but all of them, pastor as well as people, were too well bred for that sort of intimate discussion to be forced between them. He found, after some years' experience, that they were willing to let him look after their morals, but they proposed to look after their spiritual affairs themselves—which is one of the commonest and queerest developments of modern religious thought.
In the course of time, Thorburn grew weary of trying to spiritualize a congregation of people who were so well off in this world that they regarded their probable transposition to heaven with great distaste. He sickened of being restricted in his spiritual efforts to emotional women and priggish boys and girls. Religion, he felt, was an affair for men—but of the few men communicants in the
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 church, every one of them would have instantly withdrawn his subscription and quitted the church had the clergyman showed any undue solicitude about his soul. And if he had ventured to speak of their sins, in any except the most general way, the bishop would have come down upon him. So this zealous man, so cruelly misplaced, found his fashionable congregation and handsome salary utterly unendurable after that frightful and heart-breaking tragedy in his life. He was glad enough for the chance to preach to a congregation of decent brick makers, such as made up most of the population of East Harrowby, and who did not find this world so pleasant that they could not grasp the idea of a better one.
Dr. Sunbury, the rector of the handsome stone church in West Harrowby, was a good man, but he would have cut a poor figure as an apostle alongside of that independent citizen, Paul of Tarsus, or Peter the fisherman. The doctor had the kindest heart, though, and the most liberal mind in West Harrowby, and having early had a safe and easy path to heaven pointed out to him, he had walked along it for forty years, never doubting that he would get there in the end. It is true that the spectacle of Mr. Thorburn, going night and day among his poor parishioners, being doctor, nurse, adviser, everything to them, sometimes gave the excellent old doctor a qualm, but he had sense enough to see that, even if he wished to follow the same life as the Rev. Mr. Thorburn, he couldn't do it. There were no sick, poor, ignorant people in the well-bred, well-fed
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 congregation that listened to Dr. Sunbury's mild and strictly general exhortations.
Priscilla Mildmay alone of all the doctor's flock went after the new parson at East Harrowby and his shabby, uncomfortable church. But Priscilla always had an odd way with her, so her elder sisters gently lamented. For example, instead of reading the religious flapdoodle with which they were quite satisfied, Priscilla would devour her Thomas à Kempis as if all of truth was to be found therein, and declared she could not read anything after that except the four Gospels. The Misses Mildmay had not failed to report Priscilla's iniquity to Dr. Sunbury, but they got cold comfort.
"Let the girl alone," he said. "Thorburn's a better preacher than I am, and, God knows, he is a better man" (the doctor possessed, without knowing it, one of the greatest Christian' virtues—humility) "and don't bother her. She is right. I'd go to hear Thorburn myself if I didn't have to preach." The two clergymen were upon the most friendly terms, although so widely apart in every respect but that of mutual good-will. The only house in West Harrowby that Thorburn visited was Dr. Sunbury's and the old doctor trudged over to East Harrowby sometimes, to smoke a pipe of peace in Thorburn's dingy lodgings. Dr. Sunbury hated walking, but he could not find it in his conscience to drive over to that woe-begone community in his snug brougham—all of which the recording angel put down in his favor.
Priscilla's face had not escaped Thorburn's
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 notice. He had keen eyes, and he saw everything. He saw Priscilla with wonder. Women, as a rule, did not flock to his church. They said they found his sermons cold. Men, and some of them none of the best, chiefly made up his audiences. It was not hard anywhere to observe Priscilla's snow-drop face in her little black bonnet, with her eager, beseeching eyes. After a while Mr. Thorburn began to feel their mesmeric influence, as Dr. Sunbury had done ever since she was fifteen. He began to watch for her, to preach at her, to feel that she understood him—a very comfortable thing for a public speaker. Of course he knew who Miss Priscilla Mildmay was—"Very nice, but not the equal of the elder Misses Mildmay," he usually heard—and sometimes they had met at Dr. Sunbury's. As Mr. Thorburn was naturally a silent man, and Priscilla lacked courage in a drawing-room, they scarcely exchanged half a dozen words. It came about, though, as these things will, that in the course of his parish work he came upon Priscilla—Priscilla teaching a class of ragged boys their lessons, after having taught the most stylish young ladies in West Harrowby the most elegant branches of a polite education. Some way, all the restraint they had felt in Dr. Sunbury's drawing-room melted away in the little bare school room. There Priscilla reigned supreme, calmly confident under Mr. Thorburn's searching gaze. She had a peculiar knack of teaching. Her gentle, "Now, please, boys," had the same effect as Mr. Thorburn's stern, "See, you fellows, behave yourselves." Mr. Thor
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burn watched with admiration the tact with which she managed her somewhat unruly crowd.
Of course all this teaching did not go on with the unqualified approbation of the Misses Mildmay. Priscilla showed a phenomenal determination about it, and being upheld by Dr. Sunbury, who in some way always encouraged her vagaries, the Misses Mildmay, although they might look coldly on it, could not forbid it.
It did not take much to violently excite West Harrowby; and therefore when the Harrowby union-Palladium published one morning, with a big display head that covered half the first page of the paper, the burning of the Northern Lunatic Asylum, a certain circumstance connected therewith gave West Harrowby something to talk about for a week. Five inmates of the women's ward were missing, and among them was Mrs. Eleanor Thorburn. Five bodies, charred beyond recognition, were found in the ruins. Some days after a notice appeared in the obituary column of the union-Palladium: "Suddenly, on the 17th of February, Mrs. Eleanor Thorburn, wife of the Reverend Edmund Thorburn, of East Harrowby." That was all.
Nobody—not the most censorious—could accuse Mr. Thorburn of not paying scrupulous respect to his wife's memory. Yet it made but little outward difference in his life. For two or three Sundays he was absent from his pulpit, and when he reappeared he wore a band of crape upon his hat.
So things went on until nearly two years had slipped past. One spring afternoon Dr. Sunbury,
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 with his particular chum and crony, Dr. Forman, the great light of the medical profession in and about Harrowby, was enjoying a quiet saunter through the familiar shady street. They had wrestled in argument so often, and practiced in company so much, that Dr. Sunbury had become a pretty good doctor of medicine, and Dr. Forman was no mean proficient in theology. Right in the midst of a friendly-fierce wrangle on the subject of ecclesiastical history, Dr. Forman suddenly remarked, "That's going to be a match."
Dr. Sunbury glanced up, and saw Mr. Thorburn, as he met Priscilla Mildmay, stop, smile, speak a few words, and, lifting his hat, go upon his way.
"Bless my soul!" almost shouted Dr. Sunbury, stopping short and gazing at Dr. Forman's immovable face.
"Why not?" said the doctor testily. "I see them together half a dozen times a week."
Dr. Sunbury was at heart an inveterate matchmaker, as all truly benevolent old persons are apt to be, and as soon as he allowed his imagination to feast upon the idea of a match between Thorburn and Priscilla, its manifest fitness impressed itself so upon him that he would fain have got out a license, gone to them, and commanded them to stand up and be married immediately. He did, however, firmly resolve to give Thorburn a hint; but giving Thorburn hints was always a matter of more or less difficulty with everybody. At last, however, the opportunity came, and Dr. Sunbury
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 seized it courageously. He had been spending the evening with Mr. Thorburn at his lodgings, and the other clergyman happening to mention, as Dr. Sunbury was taking his leave, that he thought of getting lodgings elsewhere, Dr. Sunbury remarked quite naturally that he "had heard something regarding Mr. Thorburn and Miss Priscilla Mildmay which perhaps accounted for the proposed change." They were standing at Mr. Thorburn's door, and by the bright moonlight Dr. Sunbury saw the dark flush which overspread Mr. Thorburn's somewhat saturnine face.
"I—I assure you—" he began; and then, after a pause, "I am too old."
"Nonsense!" replied Dr. Sunbury. "Priscilla is nearly twenty-six" (ah! doctor, you know she was only twenty-five month before last), "and you are—let me see—thirty-seven."
"Thirty-nine," conscientiously said Mr. Thorburn.
"Well, thirty-nine. You are enough man of the world to see that age interposes no obstacle in the case. However, I shall say no more. Good-night."
"If I hadn't been going just then, I don't think I could have said it," confidentially remarked Dr. Sunbury to Dr. Forman.
The little seed that Dr. Sunbury had planted in Mr. Thorburn's mind grew, and waxed to be a great tree. But all the time he looked upon it as impossible. Priscilla was but a child, and he was a man grown old in sorrow, in suffering, and
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 labor. No, it could never be. And having come to the conclusion that he was in no danger whatever, Mr. Thorburn fared just as such presumptuous Samsons always do. He met Priscilla under the most adverse circumstances, running home from a shower, and in a manner the most unexpected to himself, proposed to her just as they came in front of the West Harrowby savings-bank, which was also the post-office and the principal apothecary's shop. Priscilla's behavior was of a piece with his own. The idea had never been presented to her mind before, and it was a matter that required the utmost circumspection in deciding, and yet by the time she reached her own door she had accepted Mr. Thorburn, the rain meanwhile from his umbrella trickling in little rivers down her back. There was neither time nor opportunity for love-making in the midst of a pouring shower, upon the pavement in front of the Mildmay mansion, so Mr. Thorburn could only take her little cold hand and say, "God bless you, God bless you, my Priscilla!"
In due course of time the wedding—a very quiet one—came off, and Mr. and Mrs. Thorburn were settled in a modest rectory in East Harrowby. The Misses Mildmay had suggested—indeed, urged—that Mr. Thorburn should establish his rectory in the more fashionable precinct of West Harrowby, but Mr. Thorburn demurred, on the ground of its being a clergyman's duty to live in his parish.
They were as happy as the day was long. Priscilla, under the new influence of happiness and
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 good roast beef and a daily pint of porter, grew rosy, and blossomed out into a regular beauty, and Mr. Thorburn's face lost that painful expression it had been wont to wear when he strode through the streets on his parish work. And time went by so fast—so fast; they had been married nearly three years, when they felt as if their honey-moon was just beginning.
It was getting toward dusk one misty November afternoon when Priscilla went tripping past Dr. Forman's house, which stood on the opposite side of the street. The moisture from the over-hanging branches of the elm trees was dripping upon her, and her boots were quite soaked through. Across the way the doctor was just stepping out of his buggy, and she stopped and debated whether she should not go over and ask him to drive her a quarter of a mile further down the road to the rectory. As she stood hesitating, a woman approached her out of the mist, and spoke.
"May I inquire," she said, "the way to the house of the Rev. Mr. Thorburn?"
She was perhaps forty, and had once been pretty. Even now a certain pathetic charm atta............