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"Dear friends, come and take this blessedness; it is offered to you; it
is the good news that Jesus came to preach to the poor. It is not like
the riches of this world, so that the more one gets the less the rest
can have. God is without end; his love is without end--"
Its streams the whole creation reach,
So plenteous is the store;
Enough for all, enough for each,
Enough for evermore.
Dinah had been speaking at least an hour, and the reddening light of the
parting day seemed to give a solemn emphasis to her closing words. The
stranger, who had been interested in the course of her sermon as if
it had been the development of a drama--for there is this sort of
fascination in all sincere unpremeditated eloquence, which opens to one
the inward drama of the speaker's emotions--now turned his horse aside
and pursued his way, while Dinah said, "Let us sing a little, dear
friends"; and as he was still winding down the slope, the voices of the
Methodists reached him, rising and falling in that strange blending of
exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of a hymn.
Chapter III
After the Preaching
IN less than an hour from that time, Seth Bede was walking by Dinah's
side along the hedgerow-path that skirted the pastures and green
corn-fields which lay between the village and the Hall Farm. Dinah had
taken off her little Quaker bonnet again, and was holding it in
her hands that she might have a freer enjoyment of the cool evening
twilight, and Seth could see the expression of her face quite clearly as
he walked by her side, timidly revolving something he wanted to say to
her. It was an expression of unconscious placid gravity--of absorption
in thoughts that had no connection with the present moment or with her
own personality--an expression that is most of all discouraging to a
lover. Her very walk was discouraging: it had that quiet elasticity that
asks for no support. Seth felt this dimly; he said to himself, "She's
too good and holy for any man, let alone me," and the words he had
been summoning rushed back again before they had reached his lips. But
another thought gave him courage: "There's no man could love her better
and leave her freer to follow the Lord's work." They had been silent for
many minutes now, since they had done talking about Bessy Cranage;
Dinah seemed almost to have forgotten Seth's presence, and her pace
was becoming so much quicker that the sense of their being only a few
minutes' walk from the yard-gates of the Hall Farm at last gave Seth
courage to speak.
"You've quite made up your mind to go back to Snowfield o' Saturday,
Dinah?"
"Yes," said Dinah, quietly. "I'm called there. It was borne in upon my
mind while I was meditating on Sunday night, as Sister Allen, who's in a
decline, is in need of me. I saw her as plain as we see that bit of thin
white cloud, lifting up her poor thin hand and beckoning to me. And this
morning when I opened the Bible for direction, the first words my
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