She thought
he had better go down and look at the furnace and see if it was in
order; she had had the pipes cleaned, but perhaps it needed
blacking; the cook would show him how it worked. She went with him
to the head of the basement stairs, and calling down, "Jane, here is
Lemuel, come to look after the furnace," left him and Jane to
complete the acquaintance upon coming in sight of each other, and
went back to the minister. He had risen to go, and she gave him her
hand, while a smile rippled into laughter on her lips.
"Do you think," she asked, struggling with her mirth to keep unheard
of those below, "that it is quite the work for a literary man?"
"If he is a man," said Sewell courageously, "the work won't keep him
from being literary."
Miss Vane laughed at his sudden recovery of spirit, as she had
laughed at his dejection; but he did not care. He hurried home, with
a sermon kindling in his mind so obviously, that his wife did not
detain him beyond a few vital questions, and let him escape from
having foisted his burden upon Miss Vane with the simple comment,
"Well, we shall see how that will work."
As once before, Sewell tacitly took a hint from his own experience,
and enlarging to more serious facts from it, preached effort in the
erring. He denounced mere remorse. Better not feel that at all, he
taught; and he declared that what is ordinarily distinguished from
remorse as repentance, was equally a mere corrosion of the spirit
unless some attempt at reparation went with it.
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