"Shanno is dead," murmured Jeremy to himself, and the tears wrung from his own tender heart coursed unseen down his cheeks, as with bent head he listened, straining every nerve to lose no word of his friend's utterance, and thinking of his own loved wife and babe at home. But though soon, borne along on the torrent of the preacher's eloquence, the people's hearts failed them for sorrow at his heartrending description of the prophet's woe, and sobs burst from them on every hand, yet Percival himself spake on, dry-eyed, with unfaltering lips, nor ever failed for word to make his lesson of sublimest resignation strike home to the very inmost heart of his hearers. Yet though to them he failed not to convey the message he desired, or to impart his teaching with fullest seeming confidence, his friend, reading below the surface of his mind and learning the undercurrents beneath that glow of burning eloquence, perceived the inward torture which had driven the young preacher in very self-defence to give forth so bravely to others that hard lesson beneath which his own soul yet shrank in bitter recoil. To his own rebellious soul had Percival been preaching in those plain, stern accents of glowing force, in which only his bosom friend had detected the lack of his own heart's loving submission, the secret failing of that spirit of sweetness and loving-kindness which had ever been one of the most beautiful features of his character, and which now, eclipsed by the weight of his suffering, gave the unnaturally hard ring to his voice and the icy composure to his demeanour. But to the simple mountain-folk, to whom he was an utter stranger, his voice had been like that of a herald from heaven, and his face as the face of an angel, and to their ears never had their own tongue resounded more musically and sweetly within those ancient walls. Subdued and softened, they passed out of the church, and took their way down the hillside, talking gently together of the wonderful words of the unknown preacher, and making vague conjectures as to the sorrows which had so plainly marked his beautiful countenance. Meanwhile the young chaplain, exhausted in mind and body, lay prostrate at the foot of the altar, his face buried in his hands, and dry, tearless sobs from time to time shaking his otherwise motionless frame. His friend waited long for him in the porch, till finding that even the clerk had left the church, and that still Percival tarried, he turned back into the now fast-darkening building, and sought for him amid the shadows, till there on the altar-step he found him, wrestling with his misery, as he thought, alone with God. He stooped over him, gently touching him on the shoulder, and Percival rose, startled, to his feet, and turned haggard eyes upon the friend he had so little expected just then to see.