juncture to feel after as vaguely as animals feel after something they
want and have not? But as for him, he understood religion; he was quite
capable of being priest of his household, and he felt that its weak
demand for a form of worship at this time was legitimate. In a minute,
therefore, he got up, and fetching a large Bible from the living-room he
sat down again and turned over its leaves with great precision and
reverence.

He read one of the more trenchant of the Psalms, a long psalm that had
much in it about enemies and slaughter. It had a very strong meaning for
him, for he put himself in the place of the writer. The enemies
mentioned were, in the first place, sins--by which he denoted the more
open forms of evil; and, in the second place, wicked men who might
interfere with him; and under the head of wicked men he classed all whom
he knew to be wicked, and most other men, whom he supposed to be so. He
was not a self-righteous man--at least, not more self-righteous than
most men, for he read with as great fervour the adjurations against sins
into which he might fall as against those which seemed to him pointed
more especially at other sinners who might persecute him for his
innocence. He was only a suspicious man made narrower by isolation, and
the highest idea he had of what God required of him was a life of
innocence. There was better in him than this--much of impulse and action
that was positively good; but he did not conceive that it was of the
workings of good that seemed so natural that God took account.

Upon Saul also the psalm had adequate effect, for it sounded to him
pious, and that was all he desired.

The girl, however, could not listen to a word of it. She fidgeted, not
with movement of hands or feet, but with the restlessness of mind and