They had never exchanged words, and the lofty and self-absorbed Rector knew nothing of the tenants of the Old Wood Lodge; yet he began to look towards the corner whence that intelligent and watching face flashed upon his maze of vehement and uncertain thought. He began to look, as a relief, for the upward glance of those awed yet pitying eyes, which followed him, yet somehow, in their simplicity, were always before him, steadfastly shining in the calm and deep assurance of a higher world than his. It was not by any means, at this moment, a young man and a young woman looking at each other with the mutual sympathy and mutual difference of nature; it was Genius, sweet, human, and universal, tender in the dews of youth--and Intellect, nervous, fiery, impatient, straining like a Hercules after the Divine gift, which came to the other sleeping, as God gives it to His beloved. The Curate of Winterbourne was the most admirable foil to his reverend principal. This young and fervent churchman would gladly have sat in the lower seat of the restored sedilia, stone-cold and cushionless, at any risk of rheumatism, had not his reverence the Rector put a decided interdict upon so extreme an example of rigid Anglicanism. As it was, his bland and satisfied youthful face in the reading-desk made the strangest contrast in the world to that dark, impetuous, and troubled countenance, lowering in handsome gloom from the pulpit. The common people, who held the Rector in awe, took comfort in the presence of the Curate, who knew all the names of all the children, and was rather pleased than troubled when they made so bold as to speak to him about a place for Sally, or a ’prenticeship for John. His own proper place in the world had fallen happily to this urbane and satisfied young gentleman. He was a parish priest born and intended, and accordingly there was not a better parish priest in all Banburyshire than the Reverend Eustace Mead. While the Rector only played and fretted over these pretty toys of revived Anglicanism, with which he was not able to occupy his rapid and impetuous intellect, they sufficed to make a pleasant reserve of interest in the life of the Curate, who was by no means an impersonation of intellect, though he had an acute and practical little mind of his own, much more at his command than the mind of Mr Rivers was at his. And the Curate preached devout little sermons, which the rustical people did not gape at; while the Rector, out of all question, and to the perception of everybody, was, in the most emphatic sense of the words, the wrong man in the wrong place.