Whether he was heeded amid the babble of cries and all the noises which seemed to swell to drown his voice, he could not tell, but in another instant he felt that friendly hands had seized Miss Morison, and were endeavoring to lift her insensible form. He strove to loosen his hold, but the effort gave him agony so intolerable that he could do nothing. A thousand points seemed to rend and tear him as he tried to move, and when a voice somewhere above him shouted: "We'll have to try to lift them together!" he experienced a strange sort of double consciousness as if he stood outside of himself and heard others talking of him. He felt himself grasped under the arms, and the pain of being moved was too horrible to be endured. He shrieked in mortal agony, and then in a whirl of dizzying circles seemed to go down in a tide of blackness sparkling with millions of sharp scintillations.
LIKE COVERED FIRE Much Ado about Nothing, iii. 1.
Philip Ashe found himself less and less able either to understand or to sympathize with the politics of Mrs. Wilson. He believed in the righteousness of her cause, and was keenly alive to the peril of the appointment of Mr. Strathmore to the vacant bishopric. It is an inevitable and necessary condition of enthusiasm that it shall be narrow; and religious fervor would be impossible to a mind open to conviction. To accept the possibility of any opposed truth is to be secretly doubtful of the creed which one holds; and tolerance is of necessity the child of indifference. Had Ashe been able to perceive that the church would go on much the same no matter which of the rival candidates was chosen, it would have been impossible for him to be so deeply concerned for the success of Father Frontford. As it was he was as much in earnest as Mrs. Wilson, and thus he felt forced to acquiesce in the strangeness of her methods of work. He said to himself that he supposed this electioneering to be a necessity, no matter how unpleasant; and he added the reflection that in any case it was not in his power to prevent it.
Other feelings were, moreover, completely absorbing his mind. Although he was not yet conscious that anything had come between him and the church, priesthood in which had been his highest earthly ideal, the truth was that his passion for Mrs. Fenton waxed steadily. Chance threw them together. Mrs. Fenton had been appointed to a committee on charities, and it happened that Ashe was a visitor in the North End in a region which the committee were making an especial field of labor. He was called into consultation with her, and sometimes they even went together to visit some of the poverty-stricken families which evidently existed chiefly to be subjects for philanthropic manipulation. Day by day Ashe felt her speak to him more easily and familiarly; and although their talk was strictly impersonal and unemotional, none the less did it feed his growing love.