I hear very good accounts of him. He said he was going
to write you. Well! And Mr. Corey is well?" He smiled more beamingly
upon Lemuel, who felt that he wished him to go, and stood haplessly
trying to get away.
In the midst of his own uneasiness Sewell noted Lemuel's. "Is there
anything--something--you wished to speak with me about?"
"No. No, not anything in particular. I just saw the light, and--"
Sewell took his hand and wrung it with affection.
"It was so good of you to run in and see me. Don't fancy it's been
any disturbance. I'd got into rather a dim place in my work, but
since I've been standing here with you--ha, ha, ha! those things do
happen so curiously!--the whole thing has become perfectly luminous.
I'm delighted you're getting on so nicely. Give my love to Mr.
Corey. I shall see you soon again. We shall all be back in a little
over a fortnight. Glad of this moment with you, if it's only a
moment! Good-bye!"
He wrung Lemuel's hand again, this time in perfect sincerity, and
eagerly shut him out into the night.
The dim place had not become so luminous to him as it had to the
minister. A darkness, which the obscurity of the night faintly
typified, closed round him, pierced by one ray only, and from this
he tried to turn his face. It was the gleam that lights up every
labyrinth where our feet wander and stumble, but it is not always
easy to know it from those false lights of feeble-hearted pity, of
mock-sacrifice, of sick conscience, which dance before us to betray
to worse misery yet.
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