others might go in at the gate which he closed against himself. What could Anthony's burden seem beside his own? The system in which his religious thought had been moulded had developed in Davids character both an extraordinary greatness and an extraordinary littleness; for while he longed with an ardent and intense love to save the souls about him, longed so that he would sacrifice his dearest hopes, his peace, his very integrity,--he yet appeared to himself to be fighting single-handed, to be alone in the tremendous struggle, sometimes as if our God himself were regarding it passively without stretching forth his hand to save. And this blank and awful solitude opened out before him, as the path in which he must walk, with bleeding feet, and now with the hateful companionship of a sin bound to him by a voluntary acceptance forever. CHAPTER TWENTY THREE. Thorpe was a little excited over Mr Mannering's garden party. To be sure it could boast of much the same amount of hospitality annually offered as the other little country-places in the neighbourhood, but, on the other hand, these hospitalities generally took the form of dinner-parties, and people came in closed carriages or flies, instead of driving in gayly with their pretty bright colours flashing out for the benefit of the women who stood on the door-steps, or the children who were all agape. Besides, owing to the Vicars death, there had been fewer gayeties than usual, and another sort of gloom had gathered about the village after the rumour of Anthony's deed made a break in the old cordial intercourse. Robert Mannering was sorely perplexed and grieved. Faithfulness to his old love made him quick to resent for Margaret Hare any injustice done to her daughter, and yet the estrangement from Anthony was very painful to him. He had tried to prevent it, but he could not show that there was perfect trust in his mind, and Anthony was keenly offended. Throughout his boyhood and bright youth the young fellow had been full of sanguine ardour, flushed with dreams and visions of great things to be done, where he was always the champion and deliverer, and would go forth, single-handed if need were, to fight against wrong. Suddenly, in a shape of which he had never dreamed, wrong had leaped upon him, and smitten all his weapons out of his hand, so that where nothing had seemed impossible was there now anything possible except weariness and bitterness to the end? Such a mood, if he had belonged to another creed, might have driven him to become a Trappist, not from any deepening of religion, but rather from repulsion of the life he had hitherto lived, which had so instantaneously changed colour. One would speak reverently of the workings of a man's soul in a crisis of his life, knowing that there is at times a strangeness, a madness, a wilfulness, at war with what is highest and noblest, making strife terrible, and asking from us prayer rather than judgment.