It was a rude shock to her to find herself thus suspected; though perhaps it was one which she needed.

She had never, since one first trouble ten years ago, known any real grief; and had therefore had all the more time to make a luxury of unreal ones.

She was treated by the simple folk around her as all but inspired; and being possessed of real powers as miraculous in her own eyes as those which were imputed to her were in theirs (for what are real spiritual experiences but daily miracles ?) she was just in that temper of mind in which she required, as ballast, all her real goodness, lest the moral balance should topple headlong after the intellectual, and the downward course of vanity, excitement, deception, blasphemous assumptions be entered on.
Happy for her that she was in Protestant and common-sense England, and in a country parish, where mesmerism and spirit-rapping were unknown.
Had she been an American, she might have become one of the most lucrative "mediums;" had she been born in a Romish country, she would have probably become an even more famous personage.

There is no reason why she should not have equalled or surpassed, the ecstasies of St.
Theresa, or of St.Hildegardis, or any other sweet dreamer of sweet dreams; have founded a new order of charity, have enriched the clergy of a whole province, and have died in seven years, maddened by alternate paroxysms of self-conceit and revulsions of self-abasement.
Her own preachers and class-leaders, indeed (so do extremes meet), would not have been sorry to make use of her in somewhat the same manner, however feebly and coarsely: but her innate self-respect and modesty had preserved her from the snares of such clumsy poachers; and more than one good-looking young preacher had fled desperately from a station where, instead of making a tool of Grace Harvey, he could only madden his own foolish heart with love for her.
So Grace had reigned upon her pretty little throne of not unbearable sorrows, till a real and bitter woe came; one which could not be hugged and cherished, like the rest; one which she tried to fling from her, angrily, scornfully, and found to her horror, that, instead of her possessing it, it possessed her, and coiled itself round her heart, and would not be flung away.

She--she, of all beings, to be suspected as a thief, and by the very man whose life she had saved! She was willing enough to confess herself--and confessed herself night and morning--a miserable sinner, and her heart a cage of unclean birds, deceitful, and desperately wicked--except in that.