Home they crept together,
speechless and hopeless all three, to be thenceforth the contempt
and not the envy of their fellow parishioners. For if the vulgar
feeling towards the home born prophet is superciliousness, what
must the sentence upon failure be in ungenerous natures, to which
every downfall of another is an uplifting of themselves! But Mr
Graham's worth had gained him friends in the presbytery, and he
was that same week appointed to the vacant school of another parish.
There it was not long before he made the acquaintance of Griselda
Campbell, who was governess in the great house of the neighbourhood,
and a love, not the less fine that it was hopeless from the first,
soon began to consume the chagrin of his failure, and substitute for
it a more elevating sorrow;--for how could an embodied failure,
to offer whose miserable self would be an insult, dare speak of
love to one before whom his whole being sank worshipping. Silence
was the sole armour of his privilege. So long as he was silent, the
terrible arrow would never part from the bow of those sweet lips;
he might love on, love ever, nor be grudged the bliss of such
visions as to him, seated on its outer steps, might come from any
chance opening of the heavenly gate. And Miss Campbell thought
of him more kindly than he knew.
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