It was a particularly mild day for the fourth Sunday in Advent, and he found Miss Hammond still lingering before the door, She was looking for violets under the north wall, and he joined her, and naturally broke out at once with the story of what had happened. She was wearing a little close bonnet, which set off her piquant features and bright coloring to peculiar advantage, and, as far as looks went, no young man in trouble ever had a better listener. Only to stand beside her on the lawn, where the old trees shut out all view of the town and the troubles he connected with it, was a relief. Of course the search for violets was soon abandoned. “It is abominable!” she said. But her voice was like the cooing of a dove. She did everything softly. Even her indignation was gentle. “But you have not heard yet,” he protested, “why I really was late.” “I know what is being said,” she murmured, looking up at him, a gleam of humor in her brown eyes—“that you stayed at the Homfrays’ all night, playing cards. My maid told me as we came in—after church.” “Ha! I knew that they were saying something of the kind,” he replied savagely. He was so stern that she felt her little attempt at badinage reproved. “The true reason was of a very different description. What spiteful busybodies they are! I started to return last evening about half-past nine, but as I passed Baer Hill Colliery I learned that there had been an accident. A man going down the shaft with the night shift had been crushed—hurt beyond help,” the rector continued in a lower voice. “He wanted to see a clergyman, and the other pitmen, some of whom had seen me pass earlier in the day, stopped me and took me to him.” “How sad! How very sad!” she ejaculated. Somehow she felt ill at ease with him in this mood. With his last words a kind of veil had fallen between them. “I stayed with him the night,” the rector continued. “He died at half-past nine this morning. I came straight from that to this. And they say these things of me!” His voice, though low, was hard, and yet there was a suspicious break in it as he uttered his last words. Injustice touches a man, young and not yet hardened, very sorely; and he was overwrought. Laura, fingering her little bunch of violets, heard the catch in his voice, and knew that he was not very far from tears. She was almost terrified. She longed to respond, to say the proper thing, but here her powers deserted her. She was not capable of much emotion, unless the call especially concerned herself; and she could not rise to this occasion. She could only murmur again that it was abominable and too bad, or, taking her cue from the young man’s face, that it was very sad. She said enough, it is true, to satisfy him, though not herself; for he only wanted a listener. And when he went in to lunch Mrs. Hammond more than bore him out in all his denunciations; so that when he left to go to the schools he had fully made up his mind to carry things through.