His mood was stormy.

Would he accept life itself from the hand of him who denied his Master ?--seek to the powers of darkness for cure ?--kneel to Antichrist for favor, as if he and not Jesus were lord of life and death?
Would _he_ pray a man to whom the Bible was no better than a book of ballads, to come betwixt him and the evils of growing age and disappointment, to lighten for him the grasshopper, and stay the mourners as they went about his streets! He had half turned, and was on the point of walking silent into the house, when he bethought himself of the impression it would make on the unbeliever, if he were thus to meet the offer of his kindness.

Half turned, he stood hesitating.
"I have a passion for therapeutics," persisted the doctor; "and if I can do any thing to ease the yoke upon the shoulders of my fellows--" Mr.Drake did not hear the end of the sentence: he heard instead, somewhere in his soul, a voice saying, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." He _could_ not let Faber help him.
"Doctor, you have the great gift of a kind heart," he began, still half turned from him.
"My heart is like other people's," interrupted Faber.

"If a man wants help, and I've got it, what more natural than that we should come together ?" There was in the doctor an opposition to every thing that had if it were but the odor of religion about it, which might well have suggested doubt of his own doubt, and weakness buttressing itself with assertion But the case was not so.

What untruth there was in him was of another and more subtle kind.