He called out the thoughts lurking in men’s souls, and set them to dealing with those thoughts, not with him. Many were slow to discover that he was a divine musician, playing upon the holy strings of their hearts. They thought the tunes came alive in their own air—as indeed they did, only another hand woke them. To work thus, he had to lay bare his own feelings—where it was brotherly to show feeling, he counted it unchristian to hide it.

Barbara was happy all day long. She had learned from Wingfold that the bookbinder was gone, but was at the time too busy to question him about the reasons. Till her mother was well, it was enough to know that Richard had wanted to see her, doubtless to tell her all about it. She often thought of him, what he had done for her, and what she had tried to do for him—she was certain he would one day believe in God. She did not suspect any quarrel with the people at Mortgrange. She thought perhaps the secret concerning him had come out and he did not choose to remain in the house. As soon as she was able she would go and hear of him from his grandfather. There was no hurry. She would certainly see him again before long. And he would be sure to write. It did not occur to her that a man in his position would hardly venture to contact her again without some renewed approach on her part. Thus, for a long time she was not uneasy.

The hope alive in Wingfold made him a true consoler. The very sight of him was a strength to Barbara. She regarded him with profound reverence, and his wife as most enviable of women. Barbara did not know how much the sympathy, directness, and dear common sense of Helen, had helped to keep awake, support, and nourish the insight of her husband. She did not know, good and powerful as Wingfold must have been had he never married, how much wiser, more useful, and more aspiring he had grown because Helen was Helen, and his wife, sent as certainly as ever angel in the old time.

How is it that a child begins to be good? Upon what fulcrum rests the knife-edge of change? As indistinguishable is the moment in which the turn takes place, equally perplexing to keenest investigation is the part of the being in which the renovation begins. Who shall analyse repentance? You cannot see it coming! Before you know it, there it is, and the man is no more what he was. His life is all at once upon other lines. The wind hath blown! We saw not whence it came or whither it went, but the new birth is there. It began in the spiritually infinitesimal, where all beginnings are.

Meanwhile, the change was begun in Mrs. Wylder. But the tug of war was still to come.