The only thing not in keeping with this airy spirit of renovation was the minister himself. Dr. Ranken was bleak-faced, with hard-bitten features, and a smouldering misery in his deep-set eyes. And he so constantly sought his text in the Pauline Epistles that the children came to fancy him a reincarnation of the Apostle. Georgie in particular conceived a violent dislike toward St. Paul in the person of Dr. Ranken, and within six months of her father’s death she began to wander from St. Jude’s on Sunday evenings. As Juley herself paid tentative visits to other places of worship in her search for some richer milk of the Word, she could not well forbid her daughter, but when Georgie began to attend openly the church of Mr. Nares – a Congregational pulpiteer and strenuous moralist from England who was reputed little better than a Unitarian – things were serious. Since Dr. Ranken had refused Juley’s request that he would preach at least once a year on the Millennium, she had not felt able to call upon him for his pastoral advice. She longed to consult him about Georgie, but she could not forget the manner of his refusal, nor the way he had looked at her, making her feel herself peculiar. What was to be done?

After much prayer Juley summoned all her courage, and once more visited her minister. She entered the dark study feeling painfully shy and forsaken, and when Dr. Ranken rose in his unsmiling way to shake her by the hand and bid her be seated she was smitten by a keen consciousness of widowhood. The truth was that shyness was his own affliction. Juley could have knelt before him, covering his hands with her tears, begging his counsel in her many difficulties, pouring out her heart to him. But his own forbidding reticence made of any such action a ludicrous impossibility; so she sat down in silence, praying within herself desperately that she might be given the strength to see her task through. She must try to put her case without exposing the needs of her soul in any way that he would shrink from as undignified.