CHAPTER V. MILLICENT HERITAGE AT THE YEARLY MEETING. Two years have passed, and not one of these marriages has taken place. Causes have been at work which no one without the eye of a seer could well have detected, and yet they all lay in the nature of things. To trace out their operation into events will require some considerable detail. Let us begin at Fair Manor. There we saw everything tending apparently to a happy issue. The strongest affection existed betwixt Dr. Leroy and the fair Millicent. Dr. Leroy was every day extending his practice, and through it his reputation and usefulness. The brief hours that he could steal from his duties he spent at Fair Manor, and the happy lovers might be seen taking their rides together in the neighbouring country. They often alighted at Woodburn Grange and at Bilts’ Farm, and brought an atmosphere of gladness with them. Many pleasant evenings were spent by this little circle of friends at Fair Manor. The marriage of the doctor and Millicent was regarded as a near event. In the very month, however, of May of the year following Letty Woodburn’s marriage, the Heritages went up to the Friends’ yearly meeting. Mr. and Mrs. Heritage had frequently gone on these occasions, for Mr. Heritage had his banking connections in the capital, at whose houses he saw the most influential Friends in the kingdom, and Mrs. Heritage had often what was called in the Friends’ language, a concern upon her in relation to that annual national assembling. Her appearances, as they are termed, in the ministry, both in inspirational speaking and in supplication, that is, in preaching and prayer, were often very powerful and extraordinary. In them, she often rose into the loftiest and most solemn strains of eloquence. Sometimes these depicted the general, spiritual, and moral condition of the Society; sometimes they were directed to the states of particular individuals, and opened up in such force and startling discernment the minor trials, tendencies, temptations and perils of some person or persons un-named, as caused a silence like death to fall on the meeting,—a hush, in which the spirit of the Allseeing seemed to hover awfully and palpably over it; and in one instance, suicide itself was said to have been driven in horror from the soul which contemplated it. Sometimes the very walls of the meeting-house have seemed to shake under the rush and thunder of the power thus mysteriously let loose over the assembly by the words of a woman, and the whole of the assembled Quakerism then left the place in a still and reflective mood, giving only a fervid shake of the hand to each other and saying, but not till they had reached their particular abodes,—“that was a very precious opportunity.”