Never had Reuben been more kind or attentive to the personal wants of the old gentleman than on the days which followed upon this interview. There was something almost like a daughter's solicitude in his watchfulness. On the next Sunday the Doctor preached with an emotion that was but poorly controlled, and which greatly mystified his people. Twice in the afternoon his voice came near to failing. Reuben knew where the grief lay, but wore a composed face; and as he supported the old gentleman home after service, he said, (but not so loudly that Adele could hear, who was tripping closely behind,)-- "Father, I grieve for you,--upon my soul I do; but it's fate." "Fate, Reuben?" said the Doctor, but with a less guarded voice,--"fate? God only is fate!" The Doctor was too much mortified by this revelation of Reuben's present state of feeling to make it the subject of conversation, even with Miss Eliza, and much less with the elders of his flock. To Squire Elderkin, indeed, whose shrewd common-sense he had learned to value even in its bearings upon the "weightier matters of the law," he had dropped some desponding reflections in regard to the wilful impetuosity of his poor son Reuben, from which the shrewd Squire at once suspected the difficulty. "It's the blood of the old Major," he said. "Let it work, Doctor, let it work!" From which observation, it must be confessed, the good man derived very little comfort. Miss Eliza, though she is not made a confidant in these latter secrets of the study, cannot, however, fail to see that Reuben's constancy to the Doctor's big folios is on the wane, and that symptoms of his old boyish recklessness occasionally show themselves under the reserve which had grown out of his later experiences. She has hopes from this--true to her keen worldly wisdom--that the abandoned career of the city may yet win his final decision. But her moral perceptions are not delicate enough to discover the great and tormenting wrangle of his thought. She ventures from time to time, as on his return, and from sharp sense of duty, some wiry, stereotyped religious reflections, which set his whole moral nature on edge. Nor is this the limit of her blindness: perceiving, as she imagines she does, the ripening of all her plans with respect to himself and Adele, she thinks to further the matter by dropping hints of the rare graces of Adele and of her brilliant prospects,--assuring him how much that young lady's regard for him has been increased since his conversion, (which word has to Reuben just now a dreary and most detestable sound,) and in a way which she counts playful, but which to him is _agacant_ to the last degree, she forecasts the time when Reuben will have his pretty French wife, and a rich one.