But even this alarming suggestion did not deter Mrs. Thimbleby from haunting the "Ranters'" meeting-room, and leaving message after message with Nick Green to be sure and tell Mr. Powell to come up to her house, the very minute he arrived. Nick Green knew no more than the widow the day and hour of the preacher's arrival. All he could say was, that Powell had applied to him and to his co-religionists for leave to preach in the room--little more than a loft--which they rented of the corn-dealer in Lady Lane. Powell had been refused permission to speak in the Wesleyan chapel to which his eloquence had formerly attracted such crowds of listeners. Whit Meadow would, indeed, be probably open to him; but the year was drawing on apace, autumn would soon give place to winter, and, at all events in the evening, it would be vain to hope for a large number of listeners in the open air. "Open air!" echoed Mrs. Thimbleby, raising her hands and eyes; "why, Mr. Green, he ought never to think of preaching in the open air at this season, and him so delicate!" "Nay, sister Thimbleby," responded Nick Green, a powerful, black-muzzled fellow with a pair of lungs like a blacksmith's bellows, "we may not put our hand to the plough and turn back. We are all of us called upon to give ourselves body and soul in the Lord's service. And many's the night, after my day's work was over, that I've exhorted here in this very room and poured out the Word for two and three hours at a stretch, until the sweat ran down my face like water, and the brethren were fairly worn out. But yet I have been marvellously strengthened. I doubt not that Brother Powell will be so too, especially now that he has given up dead words, and the errors of the Society, and thrown off the yoke of the law." "Dear, I hope so," answered Mrs. Thimbleby, tremulously; "but I do wish he would try a hot posset of a night, just before going to bed." The good woman was beginning to walk away up Lady Lane, somewhat disconsolately, for she reflected that if Nick Green measured Mr. Powell's strength by his own, he would surely not spare it, and that the preacher needed rather a curb than a spur to his self-forgetting exertions, when she almost ran against a man who was coming in the opposite direction. They were not twenty paces from the door of the corn-dealer's store-house, and a lamp that burnt above it shed sufficient light for her to recognise the face of the very person who was in her thoughts. "Mr. Powell!" she exclaimed in a joyful tone. "Thanks be to the Lord that I have met you! Was you going to look for Mr. Green? He is just putting the lights out and coming away. I left a message with him for you, sir; but now I can give it you myself. You will come up with me to my house, now, won't you? Everything is ready, and has been these three days. You wouldn't think of going anywhere else in Whitford but to my house, would you, Mr. Powell?"