from discussing the subject with her fellow-servant. Martha, as the back-stairs custodian of the family honour, could not permit herself to gossip with the housemaid about John Musgrave’s affairs.

Chapter Two.

The Rev. Walter Errol stood in the vestry doorway and watched, as he had watched for many years, his departing congregation. It was a large congregation, disproportionately large, considering the size of the parish. It was drawn mainly from the neighbouring parish of Rushleigh, which was a big town compared with Moresby. But the incumbent of Moresby was an eloquent preacher, and the Rushleigh inhabitants found that the two-mile walk across the fields was well repaid in the satisfaction of hearing the message they desired to hear presented to them in a manner which was interesting as well as instructive, and more effective on this account. A message, whether beautiful or the reverse, has a greater hold on the imagination when effectively presented.

The flock of the Rev. Walter Errol never went away empty. There was always something in what he said to appeal to each individual member of the congregation, and so much that was novel and enlightened in his discourse that the thinker and the scholar found food for speculation, as well as the careless youth of the parish, who wandered into the church as a matter of course or from curiosity, and returned again and again because what they heard there was bright and stimulating and arresting, and gave them a sense of their own importance and responsibility in life, as well as a more beautiful conception of life itself.

The vicar, while he stood at the vestry door, was thinking of many things. Among other subjects of a greater or less importance, his thoughts turned upon John Musgrave, his sidesman and very good patron. He had read the burial service over John Musgrave’s parents, and the marriage service over John Musgrave’s sister; he had stood shoulder to shoulder with him when they were young men together, and later in middle-age they maintained their friendship, as men who hold joint memories of their youth and talk together of intimate things. He had married, John Musgrave had remained a bachelor. Each held the state of the other a matter for commiseration.

This evening the vicar was thinking of John Musgrave’s lonely condition, and was feeling quite unnecessarily sorry for the man.

“He would have made a good father,” he thought.

The one thing he never said of him was, he 

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