The influence of her words and her example upon Gerald Eversley’s life was surprising. He has left no record to account for it; but there is no doubt of it. He had accumulated facts and arguments against religion, and they fell away. In the presence of this simple fervent soul he stood abashed. He was her superior intellectually; he could easily have confuted her in argument. But it was nothing that she said, it was she herself that made the change in him. He felt as if he were becoming a Christian again despite himself. His old boyish feeling for religion began to revive. Once more he could breathe a prayer and not wholly despair of its being heard--that most moving of prayers, ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ He accompanied her to the village church. The sight of her face there, far removed from earthly thoughts, upraised to heaven, irradiate with the glow of a divine sanctity, was a lesson to him, a revelation. A new life awoke within him. He began to be happy again. The discords of his nature were harmonised. He was at peace. He owed his conversion (if it may be so called) not to reading, not to reasoning, but to the magic of a pure and holy life. Was it only religion that worked this sudden change in him? Was there not springing up in his heart another sentiment, not alien from religion and yet not a part of it, a sentiment which he could not deny, yet dared not confess, even to himself? It is dangerous when young souls, a youth and a maiden, are thrown together a great deal without restraint. Nature has a strange way of evolving sympathies and discovering affinities. ‘The way of a man with a maid’ is still one of the things that no one understands. And when a man does not want to confess the truth, it is so easy for him to deceive himself--so much easier than to deceive others--by calling his sentiment kindness, friendship, sympathy, brotherly interest, anything in fact but just the thing that it is, and by pretending to himself that it is only to help or encourage another or to give her advice that he is found so often at her side. Could Gerald have been told a few months or weeks before that he was falling in love with Ethel Venniker, he would have said _No_, it was impossible, she was too far above him, he could never win her, never be worthy of her; but his heart would perhaps have whispered _Yes_. What could he give her upon which she would not have looked disdainfully--he a poor clergyman’s son, isolated now from his home, without rank, without money, without hope of influence, not knowing as yet how he should make his way in the world? Ah! but there is only one thing that love asks for, and it is what everyone, even the poorest, can give--it is the heart. Rich or poor, high or low, rash, methinks, is the man or woman who disdains the infinite treasure of another’s heart.