suitable frame of mind in which he might express dramatically and poetically the maid's reception of her heavenly visitants than a very hot man wearing a green baize apron would appear in the doorway of the library and announce that a chest of drawers had hopelessly involved some vital knot in the domestic communications. It was no good for John to ask Hilda to do anything: his sister had taken up the attitude that it was all John's fault, that she had done her best to preserve his peace, that her advice had been ignored, and that for the rest of her life she intended to efface herself.

"I'm a mere cipher," she kept repeating.

On one occasion when a bureau of sham ebony that looked like a blind man's dream of Cologne Cathedral had managed to wedge all its pinnacles into the lintel of the front door, John observed to Laurence he had understood that only such furniture from the vicarage as was required to supplement the Ambles furniture would be brought there.

"I thought this bureau would appeal to you," Laurence replied. "It seemed to me in keeping with much of your work."

John looked up sharply to see if he was being chaffed; but his brother-in-law's expression was earnest, and the intended compliment struck more hardly at John's self-confidence than the most malicious review.

"Does my work really seem like gimcrack gothic?" he asked himself.

In a fit of exasperation he threw himself so vigorously into the business of forcing the bureau into the house that when it was inside it looked like a ruined abbey on the afternoon of a Bank Holiday.

"It had better be taken up into the garrets for the present," he said, grimly. "It can be mended later on."

The comparison of his work to that bureau haunted John at his own writing-table for the rest of the morning; thinking of the Bishop of Silchester's objection to Laurence, he found it hard to make the various bishops in his play as unsympathetic as they ought to be for dramatic contrast; then he remembered that after all it had been due to the Bishop of Silchester's strong action that Laurence had come to Ambles: the stream of insulting epithets for bishops flowed as strongly as ever, and he worked in a justifiable pun upon the name of Pierre Cauchon, his chief episcopal villain.

"I wonder, if I were allowed to, whether I would condemn Laurence to be burnt alive. Wasn't there a Saint Laurence who was grilled? I 

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