Salem Chapel by Margaret Oliphant

When the minister fully came to himself, it was after a long rapid walk of many miles through the silent fields and hazy country. There the clouds cleared off from him in the quietness. When he began to see clearly he turned back towards Carlingford. Nothing now stood between him and the crisis which henceforward must determine his personal affairs. He turned in the long country road, which he had been pursuing eagerly without knowing what he was doing, and gazed back towards the distant roofs. His heart ached and throbbed with the pangs that were past. He had a consciousness that it stirred within his breast, still smarting and thrilling with that violent access of agony -- but the climax was over. The strong pulsations fell into dull beats of indefinite pain. Now for the other world -- the neutral-coloured life. Vincent did not very well know which road he had taken, for he had not been thinking of where he was going; but it roused him a little to perceive that his homeward way brought him through Grove Street, and past Siloam Cottage, where Mr. Tufton lived.

Mrs. Tufton was at the window, behind the great geranium, when the minister came in sight. When she saw him she tapped upon the pane and beckoned him to go in. He obeyed the summons, almost without impatience, in the languor of his mind. He went in to find them all by the fire, just as they had been when he came first to Carlingford. The old minister, in his armchair, holding out his flabby white hand to his dear young brother; the invalid daughter still knitting, with cold blue eyes, always vigilant and alert, investigating everything. It was a mild day, and Mrs. Tufton herself had shifted her seat to the window, where she had been reading aloud as usual the Carlingford Gazette. The motionless warm air of the little parlour, the prints of the brethren on the walls, the attitudes of the living inhabitants, were all unchanged from the time when the young minister of Salem paid his first visit, and chafed at Mr. Tufton's advice, and heard with a secret shiver the prophecy of Adelaide, that "they would kill him in six months. " He took the same chair, again making a little commotion among the furniture, which the size of the room made it difficult to displace. It was with a bewildering sensation that he sat down in that unchangeable house. Had time really gone on through all these passions and pains, of which he was conscious in his heart? or had it stood still, and were they only dreams? Adelaide Tufton, immovable in her padded chair, with pale blue eyes that searched through everything, had surely never once altered her position, but had knitted away the days with a mystic thread like one of the Fates. Even the geranium did not seem to have gained or shed a single leaf.