While she meditated thus, major Marvel made his appearance. He had been watching outside, saw her uncle go, and an hour after was shown to the room where she still sat, staring out on the frosty trees of the square. "Why, my child," he said, with almost paternal tenderness, "your hand is as cold as ice! Why do you sit so far from the fire?" She rose and went to the fire with him. He put her in an easy chair, and sat down beside her. Common, pudgy, red-faced, bald-headed as he was, she come to him, and that out of regions of deepest thought, with a sense of refuge. He could scarcely have understood one of her difficulties, would doubtless have judged not a few of her scruples nonsensical and over-driven; yet knowing this it was a comfort to her to come from those regions back to a mere, honest, human heart--to feel a human soul in a human body nigh her. For the mere human is divine, though not _the_ divine, and to the mere human essential comfort. Should relations be broken between her and lord Gartley, she knew it would delight the major; yet she was able to look upon him as a friend in whom she could trust. Unity of _opinion_ is not necessary to confident friendship and warm love. As they talked, the major, seeing she was much depressed, and thinking to draw her from troubled thought, began to tell her some of the more personal parts of his history, and in these she soon became so interested that she began to ask him questions, and drew from him much that he would never have thought of volunteering. Before their talk was over, she had come to regard the man as she could not have imagined it possible she should. She had looked upon him as a man of so many and such redeeming qualities, that his faults must be over-looked and himself defended from any overweighing of them; but now she felt him a man to be looked up to--almost revered. It was true that every now and then some remark would reveal in him a less than attractive commonness of thinking; and that his notions in religion were of the crudest, for he regarded it as a set of doctrines--not a few of them very dishonouring to God; yet was the man in a high sense a true man. There is nothing shows more how hard it has been for God to redeem the world than the opinions still uttered concerning him and his so-called _plans_ by many who love him and try to obey him: a man may be in possession of the most precious jewels, and yet know so little about them that his description of them would never induce a jeweller to purchase them, but on the contrary make him regard the man as a fool, deceived with bits of coloured glass for rubies and sapphires. Major Marvel was not of such. He knew nothing of the slang of the Pharisees, knew little of the language of either the saints or the prophets, had, like most Christians, many worldly ways of looking at things, and yet I think our Lord would have said there was no guile in him.