My father doesn't want
me,'--here she paused. Perhaps that father really did want her, for she,
at least, loved him, and his wife did not; and she was beginning to be
conscious, daily more and more conscious, of the exceeding preciousness
of love.
Breakfast passed, with the same effort to feel at home on her part, and
attempt to keep up a conversation on that of Lady Mary, as had the
dinner of the previous day.
Harold made a diversion by bursting into the room to ask for his
soldiers. He, at least, was quite natural, and entirely spoilt.
Immediately after breakfast they drove to church. It was delightful to
Freda to see the good vicar in the reading-desk, and his wife in the pew
beneath. She felt at home again for the first time. For the first time,
also, she really listened to the worthy man's somewhat dry sermon, and
strove to feel 'in charity with all men' on that blessed day. She
thought once or twice of a sermon Rowland had preached that day
twelvemonth, which riveted the attention of his large congregation, and
made her wonder whence he had received the gift, by half-an-hour's plain
eloquent preaching, of opening the heart to receive truths hitherto more
understood than felt. Rowland had become to her, and many, the type of a
preacher and minister of the Gospel, and to him she owed, under God, the
fuller enlightenment and enlargement of her own mind.
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