But he would have it.

His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew the stories out of her.

And then how his bright frank eyes would soften! With what a reverence would he touch her hand when she said good-by! And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about Murewell as he did.

She could imagine the wild beauty of the Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rectory with its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just outside the straggling village; she could even picture the strange squire, solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author of terrible books against the religion of Christ of which she shrank from hearing, and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his future relations toward a personality so marked, and so important to every soul in the little community he was called to rule.

Here all was plain sailing; she understood him perfectly, and her gentle comments, or her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness itself.
But it was when he turned to larger things--to books, movements, leaders, of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes distressed.
Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion against the established order in the person of Mr.Grey?
Or why, ardent as his own faith was, would he talk as though opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to be made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and an obligation?
When his comments on men and things took this tinge, she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful opposition between his venturesome speech and his clergyman's dress.
And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his own.