Neale said to himself as he went home, that Mr. Kirby had surely been very hard. If a man hanged for murder was filled with hope and triumph, and certainty of glory, there must be some more speedy comfort for him than the pastor had held out. Yet, in his inmost heart, he felt that Mr. Kirby was right; and he could not for the life of him, keep away from him. He managed to meet him every day. He could seldom get a word said about the state of his mind; for Mr. Kirby did not approve of people’s talking of their feelings,—and especially of those connected with conscience: but in the deeds which issued from conscientious feelings, he found cordial assistance given. And Farmer Neale sometimes fancied that he could see the time,—far as it was ahead—when Mr. Kirby and he might be, as the pastor had himself said,—friends. The amount of confession and remorse opened out to the pastor was indeed striking, and more affecting to him than he chose to show to anybody but his wife; and not even to her did he tell many of the facts. The mushroom resolutions spawned in the heat of panic were offensive and discouraging to him: but there were better cases than these. A man who had taken into wrath with a neighbour about a gate, and had kept so for years, and refused to go to church lest he should meet him there, now discovered that life is too short for strife, and too precarious to be wasted in painful quarrels. A little girl whispered to Mr. Kirby that she had taken a turnip in his field without leave, and got permission to weed the great flower-bed without pay, to make up for it. Simpson and Sally asked him to marry them; and for poor Sally’s sake, he was right glad to do it. They were straightforward enough in their declaration of their reasons. Simpson thought nobody’s life was worth a halfpenny now, and he did not wish to be taken in his sins: while Sally said it would be worse still if the innocent baby was taken for its parents’ sin. They had to hear the publication of banns, at a time when other people were thinking of anything but marriage; and, when the now disused church was unlocked to admit them to the altar,—just themselves and the clerk,—it was very dreary; but they immediately after felt the safer and better for it. Sally thought the Good Lady would have gone to church with her, if she had been here; and she wished she could let her know that Simpson had fulfilled his promise at last. Other people besides Sally wished they could let the Good Lady know how they were going on;—how frost came at last, in January, and stopped the fever;—how families who had lived crowded together now spread themselves into the empty houses; and how there was so much room that the worst cottages were left uninhabited, or were already in course of demolition, to make airy spaces, or afford sites for better dwellings; and how it was now certain that above two-thirds of the people of Bleaburn had perished in the fever, or by decline, after it.