"My dear young man, that's my only excuse for this very infliction!" cried Miss Julia, with invincible jocosity. "If you'd rather it were destroyed, I shall be quite ready to destroy it, as Mr. Gillon knows. But I should like you to hear the whole of it first."

"And I could judge so much better if I read the rest to myself!"

And still he held his corner of the MS., and she hers with an equal tenacity, which I believe to have been partly reflex and instinctive, but otherwise due to the discovery that she had written quite serenely about a blasphemer and an atheist, and not for a moment to any other qualm or apprehension whatsoever. And then as I watched them their eyes looked past me with one accord; the sheaf of fastened sheets fluttered to the ground between them; and I turned to behold the Vicar standing grim and gaunt upon the threshold, with a much younger and still more scandalised face peeping over his shoulder."Chiefly at us, I imagine," said the Vicar dryly. "I rather suspect that the very style of writing is an attempt at personal caricature. The taste is execrable all through. But that is only to be expected of the anonymous lampooner."

"Was there really no name to it, Mr. Brabazon?"

The question was asked for information, but Uvo's tone was that of righteous disgust.

"No name at all. And one sheet of type-writing is exactly like another. My sister had not read it all herself, I gather?"

"Evidently not. And she only read the first half to us."

"Thank goodness for that!" cried the Vicar, off his guard. "The whole impertinence," he ran on more confidentially, "is so paltry, so vulgar, so egregiously badly done! It's all beneath contempt, and I shall not descend to the perpetrator's level by attempting to discover who he is. Neither shall I permit the matter to be mentioned again in my household. And as gentlemen I look to you both to resist the ventilation of a most ungentlemanly hoax."

But the promise that we freely gave did not preclude us from returning at once to No. 7, and there and then concocting a letter to Miss Julia, which I slipped into the letter-box of the makeshift vicarage as the birds were waking in the wood behind Mulcaster Park.

It was simply to say that Uvo was after all afraid that his kith and kin really might resent the publication of her thrilling but painful tale of their common ancestor; and 

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