It was not for John Ward to ask how she had been taught, or to criticise
another minister's influence, but as he walked home, with anxious,
downcast eyes, he wondered what Dr. Howe's belief could be, and how it
had been possible for her soul to have been so neglected. This woman,
whose gracious, beautiful nature stirred him with profound admiration,
was in the darkness of unbelief; she had never been taught the truth.

As he said this to himself, John Ward knew, with sudden, passionate
tenderness, that he loved her. Yet it was months before he came and told
her. What right had he to love her? he said to himself, when he knelt and
prayed for her soul's salvation: she was an unbeliever; she had never
come to Christ, or she would have known the truth. His duty to his people
confronted him with its uncompromising claim that the woman whom he
should bring to help him in his labors among them should be a Christian,
and he struggled to tear this love out of his heart.

John Ward's was an intellect which could not hold a belief subject to
the mutations of time or circumstances. Once acknowledged by his soul,
its growth was ended; it hardened into a creed, in which he rested in
complete satisfaction. It was not that he did not desire more light; it
was simply that he could not conceive that there might be more light. And
granting his premise that the Bible was directly inspired by God, he was
not illogical in holding with a pathetic and patient faith to the
doctrines of the Presbyterian Church.

Helen's belief was as different as was her mode of thought. It was
perhaps a development of her own nature, rather than the result of her
uncle's teaching, though she had been guided by him spiritually ever
since he had taken her to his own home, on the death of her parents, when
she was a little child. "Be a good girl, my dear," Dr. Howe would say. So