HUGH’S hustle of indignation against his brother-in-law carried him in one burst (like a motor-car on its top-speed) to the level of the hill where Chalkpits stood, and he rattled and hooted his way into the garden. There he found Mrs. Owen still talking to his wife, and he noticed that the subject, whatever it was, was broken off very short when he appeared on the lawn, and Mrs. Owen began with an eager finger to appreciate the beauties of the herbaceous border.

“And those beautiful pink roses over there,” she said—“what are they? I am so short-sighted.”

“They are mallows,” said Hugh.

“Yes, so they are. Don’t you adore mallows, Mr. Grainger? And did the dear Canon say anything which showed that he thought I ought to have gone to evening-service? I am afraid I am very naughty about evening-service. If he preaches, I go; if he doesn’t, I exercise free-will, or free-won’t, as he said.”

“I thought he always preached,” said Hugh, with an internal cackle of malicious delight at what he implied.

“Ah, no! I wish he did. Such wonderful eloquence!”

“He was very eloquent on the way down,” said Hugh.

Edith was watching Hugh’s movements with some anxiety, seeing, as was perfectly clear, that he was what Mrs. Owen would call “rather upset,” and easily conjecturing the cause.

“And those brilliant yellow flowers,” continued Mrs. Owen—“what are they? Like sunlight on the bed, are they not? Surely they are little sunflowers!”

“Coreopsis,” said Hugh smartly. “Cigarette, Edith?”

“Perhaps Mrs. Owen will,” said she.

Mrs. Owen looked round, as if she was afraid that the Literific were all concealed in the trees and were watching her. She occasionally smoked when she was surrounded by “the set”—but, then, London was so different.

“Well, if you will never, never tell,” she said. “I do smoke sometimes, though I can’t feel sure that I ought. I had a cigarette, I remember, after I came back from Tristan—your Tristan, Mr. Grainger. Oh, how I enjoyed it! and what a wreck I was next day.”

This sounded rather as if the cigarette was the wrecker, but she took one, blacked it all down one side with the smoke from the match, and leant back in her chair with a sense that she was doing exactly the right thing. Edith took one also, and here they all were, as Mrs. Owen gleefully thought, the author of “Gambits,” the new Tristan, and she, all smoking together. She felt that intimacy was, indeed, on the wing, and if she thought of the Alingtons at all she thought of them as the “poor Alingtons.”

Then Edith turned to her husband.

“Sit down, Hughie,” she said. “With Mrs. Owen’s leave I want to tell you what we have been talking about.”

Mrs. Owen put up deprecating hands in the attitude of prayer, palm to palm and fingers outstretched.

“Promise he shan’t scold me!” she said.

This was very winsome and called from Hugh, who was sitting a little behind her, and out of sight, a glare of concentrated hate. But Edith noticed neither the hate nor the winsomeness.

“Why, of course not!” she said. “I think you did a very friendly thing in telling me. I am most grateful to you. But I think we three had better talk it over.”

Mrs. Owen released her hands from the prayerful attitude, and shook them impatiently in the air.

“Oh! how I, my Ego, myself, disagree with what I believe to be the wisest course,” she said. “Moral geography, was it not a delicious expression of your wife’s, Mr. Grainger? We must remember we are in Mannington. How narrow and stupid it all seems to me now while I sit quietly smoking here with you.”

At this moment a huge ember of burning matter dropped from Mrs. Owen’s cigarette on to her dress, and the quiet smoke was interrupted for a moment. The contrast between Edith, the woman of the world, and all her quiet simplicity, with the woman who only succeeded in being worldly, was wonderfully marked. One was quiet and kind, the other was fussy and full of monkey-plans. Between them sat Hugh, angry and young.

“Oh, I have been having a talk about the same subject!” he said. “Do you think this storm in—in a scullery is worth discussion. I have already said exactly what I thought about it.”

Edith frowned, then laughed.

“Dear Hugh,” she said, “you must remember that we are in the scullery ourselves, and that I am the kitchen-maid who has prepared a dish which isn’t fit to be eaten. I see that now; I should have seen it all along.”

Again Mrs. Owen waved her slim, long-fingered hands in protest.

“Ah, Mrs. Grainger, how naughty you are!” she cried. “It is not the dish that is not fit, it is the diners who are not fit. That is my view.”

Again Edith’s simplicity shone out.

“In plain words, Hugh,” she said, “the paper of mine about the Nelson letters clearly won’t do. Your sister has a feeling against it, so has Canon Alington, and Mrs. Owen agrees as regards the inexpediency of reading it to the Literific.”

“Under protest—oh, such protest!” she cried.

“Yes. And now that it is so kindly pointed out to us by Mrs. Owen, we have to consider what to do next.”

“Oh, I have pronounced on that!” said Hugh. “You and I are clearly not up to the mark of the Literific, and we must retire. But we must tell Peggy.”

Mrs. Owen clapped her hands.

“How I should love to see Lady Rye’s face when she is told!” she said, in a little ecstatic aside. “What a laugh we should all have!”

Hugh, in the midst of his irritation, let the eyelid of the eye away from Mrs. Owen just quiver, as if it said, “No, you don’t!”

“Oh, Hugh, be serious!” said his wife. “As if we could do that, like huffy children. Now we are keeping Mrs. Owen——”

Mrs. Owen made so vigorous a gesture of dissent, that the flowers in her hat swayed as if a squall had passed over them. Hugh got up.

“But the matter is settled,” he said. “I have sent in our resignation; at least, I’ve practically done so.”

Mrs. Owen was absorbed. The inner life of these distinguished persons was being turned inside out before her eyes. She was as fascinated in it as a child is in the internal mechanism of a watch. And though she looked on, she, too, was of it; she was concerned in their wheels and cogs.

“Yes, but we’ve got to think of something else,” she said quietly. “I have promised to read a paper, and the one I have written clearly won’t do, so I must do my best before Friday to write another.”

Then she turned to Mrs. Owen.

“You are so kind,” she said, “that I am sure I may ask you to tell either Canon Alington or his wife that I quite see their point of view, and I will anyhow read them something. If that is not giving you too much trouble, it would be most good of you to undertake it. I don’t want to see him myself about it, because it would be much better to avoid any possibility of discussion between us, whereas he has already consulted you. And since my husband does not entirely feel with me on the subject, it is best that he should not be the intermediary. And will you say also that by to-morrow night I will send him the subject of it, so that the notices can go out early next day. My sister, Lady Rye, comes down to-morrow, and if we can’t think of anything to-night, I am sure she will be able to. And I need hardly say that I don’t want the whole thing to go any further. It would be tiresome to know that Mannington was talking about it all.”

The words were quite courteous and sincere, but they had the note of finality about them, as Edith had intended, and produced the effect of making Mrs. Owen get up, for Edith did not propose, since Hugh was so clearly “on edge,” to sit and discuss it any further.

“It will be a pleasure,” said Mrs. Owen with perfect truth, “and I will catch him after church. And may I take your paper with me, as you so kindly let me read it? Is it typewritten or in manuscript? I hope manuscript—I am so psychical, and manuscript would convey so much more to me.”

Edith turned to Hugh.

“Hugh, would you please get it for Mrs. Owen?” she asked. “It is on my table. I am afraid it is typewritten.”

Hugh could not resist one more shot at his brother-in-law.

“And you might tell Canon Alington that he must avoid the next number of the Nineteenth Century like poison,” he said, “because my wife’s paper appears in it. He might give a few words of warning in church!”

Mrs. Owen wrinkled up her eyes with her bewitching smile, and clapped her hands.

“Oh, how naughty of you!” she cried. “But how delicious!”

Hugh sped the parting guest to the door and came back again, rather lingering on his way, into the garden because he felt slightly guilty, and slightly ashamed of himself. And though, when he thought of Canon Alington’s exasperating upper-lip, he steeled himself again into anger, he felt sure that somehow or other there was a process of climbing down, and perhaps an expression of regret in front of him. For there was Edith again, as he had said once before, shining above him, and he had to get there. He would have to give up his anger before he could join her. And join her he must. Even in what he had called the storm in the scullery they must be together.

Edith welcomed him back with her serene and quiet smile.

“Sit down, Hughie,” she said, “because we have got to have quite a talk. Oh! but one thing, dear, before I begin. Do you know, you were rather rude to Mrs. Owen, and it is a dreadful pity to be rude to people. She was our guest, you see, and though perhaps neither of us like her very much, you must be polite. You rather snapped at her. You snapped ‘hollyhocks’ when she admired roses, and you snapped ‘coreopsis’ when she asked if they were sunflowers.”

“But what a fool!” cried Hugh. “And she called me naughty again at the door. Naughty!” he shouted. “And she asked herself to come and meet Peggy. I forgive her that, though, as it was so unsuccessful.”

Then he sat down by his wife’s chair.

“Yes, I was rude,” he said suddenly. “I am sorry. But I was so angry when I came in. Oh, Lord, didn’t I give it him!”

Hugh flared up again at the thought.

“And if it’s that you want to talk about,” he said, “I don’t see that it’s any use. I feel I was perfectly right. It was only ludicrous when he came and told me that ‘Tristan’ was not a fit opera to put on the stage, and that I was devoting my voice—a God-sent gift, he called it, in his horrid, canting way, because my toenails are just as God sent—to evil ends; but his telling me that your paper wasn’t fit to be read and discussed at their holy and sacred Literific was not ludicrous. It didn’t amuse me. And I didn’t amuse him.”

Hugh’s voice rose shrilly.

“And he hadn’t even read it, not even a review of it this time!” he said. “What does the man mean? Does he think that because he wears an all-round collar he has the gift of divination, so that he can pronounce on things he has never set eyes on?”

“Did you say all this?” asked Edith. “Did you quarrel with him?”

“Yes, but of course when I’d finished I asked him to shake hands. I didn’t say a word that wasn’t true. And he refused. He said he would shake hands when I expressed regret for all I had said. He couldn’t answer me back; there was nothing to say. That’s what he couldn’t forgive.”

“Tell me exactly what happened, all you said to him,” said Edith gravely.

Hugh was so worked up again by now that it is to be feared he recounted the interview with gusto, and the completeness with which he seemed to have expressed himself rather appalled his wife.

“And if you ask me if I’m sorry,” he concluded, “I’m not. He has a nasty mind and it has been my privilege to tell him so. Agnes has got a nasty mind, too. She used not to have; she used to have quite a nice one, like mine, but he has corrupted her. Bother! I wish I’d told him that. I thought of it, but I forgot again. I shall send him a postcard about it.”

Edith could not help laughing at this.

“Ah! do write it Hugh,” she said, “and then tear it up. That is such an excellent plan. If I feel very angry with anyone I do that. I don’t know that it’s a particularly Christian thing to do, but it is such a relief. You gravely write down all the nasty things you can think of, and state them in the most cutting manner. Won’t you try it?”

Hugh shook his head.

“It wouldn’t do,” he said, “because I should certainly send it. I will with pleasure if you like.”

Edith was silent a moment.

“But what are we to do?” she said. “You see you have said that you will do your utmost to make me leave the Literific, while I have sent a grovelling message by Mrs. Owen to say that I will read them a paper. The situation is impossible. As it stands, too, you are dead cuts with your brother-in-law. That’s impossible, too.”

“So is he,” remarked Hugh.

Edith pulled Hugh’s hair gently.

“Hugh, I’m going to talk for quite a long time without stopping,” she said. “In fact, you mustn’t consider I have stopped till I tell you so. Now, first of all, I just love you for having said all those things to Canon Alington, because your first reason was that you were sticking up for me. Thank you most awfully, dear.

“But then, do you know, Hughie, another reason came in. You lost your temper because you thought he was insulting me, but you continued to let it be lost because he has, times without number, got on your nerves. Though you told him you laughed at what he said about ‘Tristan,’ you told him that in order to vex him, to hurt him.”

“This is what we used to call a pi jaw at school,” remarked Hugh.

“Yes, and you can call it one now, if you like. You were really irritated by his attitude about ‘Tristan’ and about ‘Gambits,’ and though perhaps you laughed at the time, this afternoon you were not laughing at it at all. You told him that Peggy would roar about it for the same reason, in order to vex him, and you sent that message by Mrs. Owen about the Nineteenth Century for the same reason. I didn’t ask you not to then, because it would have looked to her as if you and I were at discord. But I wish you hadn’t; she is quite—quite tactless enough to give it him.

“Now, my darling, you mustn’t do things to vex people. It isn’t you when you do that. It wasn’t you this afternoon; it was your anger on my account that left the door open, and the devil got in. It is so cheap, and easy, and vulgar to be angry, and to try to vex people. And, believe me, it never does any good at all. Anger is one of the two absolutely indefensible and useless emotions, and the other is fear. Oh, Hughie, what dreadful twins!”

Hugh moved impatiently, with a shrug of his shoulders. He had shifted his seat on the grass, so that he sat sideways to her and could look at her, and he saw that her mouth was trembling a little.

“Anger frightens me,” she said, “and makes me afraid; that is why it and fear seem to me like twins. The atmosphere of it is so dreadful; it is heavy and close as before a thunderstorm. I can’t breathe in it, and whether you are angry with me or with him or with anyone else, it is only a question of degree. There is poison about. It is such a waste of time, too. One enjoys nothing when one is angry; the hours just shrivel up and die, instead of putting out flowers. I can’t help being proud of and loving the first motive that put anger into your heart, dear, but that is quite inconsistent and quite wrong of me. But for the rest——”

“Oh, but you are wrong,” said Hugh. “I enjoyed being angry this afternoon. It put out some beautiful flowers.”

“But what part of you enjoyed it?” she asked. “Not the part I love and am so proud of.”

She leaned forward to him and spoke more gently.

“Oh, Hugh, let us be kind,” she said. “Don’t let us try to improve people, or tell them that they are wrong, and narrow, and bigoted, and Puritanical. Let them be all that if they wish; it really is their business and not ours. But do let us be kind, for that beyond any doubt is our business, and leave it to others to be good for them. It is so frightfully easy to be good for other people and to speak sharply to them when we think they are behaving absurdly, but generally our motives for doing that are a little mixed; we do it because we are sour and angry ourselves, and rather enjoy spoiling their pleasure.”

The spell was beginning to work. Hugh had ceased fidgeting, and looked at her with the quiver of a smile on his mouth.

“Besides, it is such fun being kind and not bitter,” she said, “and being big and not small. Yes, small, for angry people are always small and narrow, and for an angry man to call another one narrow is for the pot to call the kettle black.”

Hugh had a slight relapse for a moment, and groaned.

“But think what a state of holy exultation he will be in,” he said, “if you meekly say you will write another paper and I, well—I suppose you mean me to express regret for what I said. Edith, I don’t think I can bear the thought of it. He will feel that he is being an instrument for good, and that his efforts and his bravery and his determination to speak out at whatever personal cost are being blessed. They aren’t, they aren’t, they are not! Are they!”

Hugh rolled over on the ground in a sort of agony at the thought.

“Agnes will call him Galahad more than ever,” he went on, “and Mrs. Owen will dedicate the Galahad cycle to him, and Ambrose will feel that the early Christian martyrs couldn’t hold a candle to his blessed father—I wish they had—and they will all sit in a row with seraphic smiles and know how noble, and holy, and happy they all are, and especially that ass. He is an ass and a prig! And, oh, dear me, Edith, how dreadfully funny it all is! But I must, I absolutely must, tell Peggy about it. Supposing she happened to find out, how dreadfully unkind she would think me for not having told her.”

Edith had the highest opinion of the value of a sense of humour, and often, so it appeared to her, it would solve a situation, and restore a cheerful equanimity or even more to the sufferer from that situation, whereas an appeal to higher motives for tolerance might have been made in vain. And whether it was her words or Hugh’s own innate sense of the ludicrous that had thus restored him, she did not care at all. Something, anyhow, she or it or himself, had dissipated his anger, and given him back the genial, though amused, outlook that a little while ago had been shrouded from him. His laughter, his rolling on the grass were kindly again, and kindliness, as she had said, she reckoned as a master-key to conduct. He might laugh at Canon Alington as much as he liked; he might laugh (and probably would) at her and her “pi jaw,” provided only he laughed not bitterly. His desire, too, to tell Peggy, as expressed just now, was whole worlds away from what his desire had been when he suggested the same thing to Mrs. Owen. He was kind again, and Edith felt as if some blot or stain had been taken off her own character.

But though kind again, Hugh immediately got grave again. After his agonised roll on the grass he sat up, and clasping his knees with his hands, leaned his chin on them, and looked at her with that kindled eye.

“Are you David?” he said—“are you David reincarnated that you expel evil spirits?”

Then Edith knew that it did matter whether it was she or Hugh’s own sense of humour that had restored him. She had told herself it did not; nor indeed in the abstract did it, but it mattered so much to her.

“Oh, Hugh, did I help?” she asked. “I am so glad!”

“Go on,” said he, “the evil spirit is only half-exorcised yet.”

“Ah, I have said it all!” she protested, “and I am afraid I was very lengthy about it. But I think it was all true, Hughie. Oh, I know it was!”

He smiled at her, waiting, entreating.

“Ah, there you are, shining, shining,” he said. “And I can’t reach you. Tell me what you feel like inside that makes you what you are. I want to get at it, and I can’t. It isn’t that you keep it back—oh, I know that—but I am not tall enough!”

For one moment she tried to laugh it off.

“I see you want to make me talk like Ambrose,” she said.

“Yes, darling; you do it so naturally,” said Hugh. “So go on.”

Again she leaned forward toward his radiant face.

“There is no impulse I can teach you, dear,” she said, “and you can only teach yourself, or let years teach you all the rest, which is practice. I have had so much more practice than you, simply because I am so much older. It is only that, for one requires the same situation to be presented to one hundreds and thousands of times before one really draws the moral. And I have so often seen my own anger making misery not only for others but for myself, that at last I began really to connect the two. One is like a puppy for so many years, and it takes one a lot of beating and being tied up to realise that it is not a good plan to gnaw other people’s shoes or to snap at other people’s hands. And slowly—oh, my Hugh, so slowly—I have learned a sort of patience, a sort of toleration for other people’s opinions. I have actually begun to believe that there are other people in the world beside myself, and that they have just as good a right to their opinion as I have to mine, and that when I happen to disagree with them it may be just possible, as Oliver Cromwell said, that I may be mistaken. Sometimes, as about this unfortunate paper of mine, my reasonable self tells me that I am right and they are wrong. Yes, I will concede that now. But what then? I may be mistaken. At any rate, at that point the law of kindness comes in. They don’t want this paper; in fact, your sister said she would resign—now be kind—rather than send out the notices. But why, why because I disagree should I make a fuss and cause unpleasantness? Do let us all be as happy and pleasant as we can. I know perfectly well that all of them are acting up to their best motives; they really think that the subject I chose was not a fit one. So I should be acting on the very worst motive if I tried to embarrass or vex them. You and I lose none of our happiness or pleasure if I write something else; and even if we did, perhaps it wouldn’t matter very much. We have got plenty left, haven’t we?”

She sat upright again for a moment, and let her eyes wander over the lawn, the quiet trees, the gray back of the down, the green water-meadow below. Then they came back to Hugh.

“It is silly to talk about the paper,” she said, “for the whole thing is so infinitesimal. But it did happen to be the text when you bade me discourse. And, after all, either nothing is infinitesimal, or else everything is. Oh, my dear, if we think of the thousand generations that came before us, and will come after, who laugh and love and hate and are angry, what do you and I matter? But we matter to God. He has chosen to put the infinite within us. Because we are human, we have to make finite things of it, but let us make them as big as we can.”

She rose with shining eyes, and stretched out her two hands to him.

“It is getting damp,” she said. “Let me pull you up.”

“You have,” said he.

In the gathering dusk they walked for a while without speech. Something had come home to Hugh; there was a fresh inmate at his secret hearth. Words, mere words, which are falsely supposed to be so ineffectual had brought it there, but the words had been winged with sincerity. Tiny though now the whole scullery-storm appeared, he saw how big was the woman who had made it appear tiny. She moved naturally on that wonderful level, and it was just because she was so big that she had treated this little thing like that. She had brought all the fineness of her nature to bear on it; she had not disproved it with indulgent impatience merely, saying that since these ridiculous people had such ridiculous feelings, she would humour them, rather than cause unpleasantness, but she had turned on to the situation all the kindliness and wisdom that she possessed. Small though the occasion was, it had been to her part of life itself, in which every detail is piece of the design. He waited further instructions about these details.

“And what am I to do?” he asked.

She laughed.

“Humble pie, dear,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose so. Oh, Lord! Why did I lose my temper?”

“For a reason that I love,” said she. “But for other reasons.”

“And must I go—and—and absolutely say so?” he asked.

“Oh, Hughie, it’s no question of ‘must,’ unless you know it is ‘must,’” she said.

He took his arm out of hers.

“Then I’ll go now,” he said. “There will be time before dinner. You see, I’m sorry just now.”

“Yes, go now,” she said.

“And I may tell Peggy to-morrow?” he asked.

Hugh left her at once, and went quickly down through the field below the house and struck into the footpath which led across to St. Olaf’s. As he got near the church, he saw the congregation beginning to stream out, and knew that if he waited by the door from the vestry he would catch his brother-in-law, after he had taken off his surplice and counted the offertory, the gifts of Alexander the coppersmith, as he had once said, when his appeal for foreign missions had provoked too great a proportion of coin of the low denomination. From within, with the congregation there poured out the melodious din of the organ, and that, with the effect of the stained-glass windows, lit from within, reminded Hugh irresistibly of the church-scene in “Faust,” when Mephistopheles waits outside for Marguerite, exactly as he himself was doing. In that case Canon Alington must be Marguerite, and he shook with an internal spasm of laughter at the thought, that for the moment made him forget his humiliating errand.

He was standing in the shadow close to the porch by which the Faust-congregation were coming out, with one eye on them, one on the vestry door, from which small choir-boys occasionally popped out like rabbits, and ran across the grave-yard with a swift reaction toward ordinary life after the two long services of the day. Ambrose, who had lately been admitted to the choir (his father had compiled a short service for the induction of a cantator) came out among them, but without racings and leapings, for he always had a bad accession of virtuous musings on Sunday evening, and walked round to the main door to meet his mother, with his boots creaking and the starlight shining on his spectacles, humming to himself in a husky treble the hymn that had just been sung. His mother always came out last from the Vicarage pew, and Ambrose had to wait while the remainder of the congregation dispersed.

Hugh had turned his back on the door, for he really could not bear that his nephew should recognise him just then, when a strangely and dreadfully familiar voice close behind him struck on his ear. Mrs. Owen had hardly waited to get outside the porch before she spoke.

“Oh! Mrs. Alington,” she said; “such good news. I must just tell you before I go round to see dear Canon Alington and tell him, too. I was with the Graingers till nearly seven, talking it all over, and dear Mrs. Grainger quite sees our point of view now. She is so anxious now to do the right thing, and she will be sure to have a paper ready by Friday which shall not touch on that dreadful subject. We were all of one mind about it—quite a family party.”

Then Agnes’s precise tones broke in.

“I am sure we are all very much obliged to you for your part in it, Mrs. Owen,” she said. “It must have required a great deal of tact and sympathetic treatment. I am afraid, however, that my brother allowed himself to speak very violently and rudely to the Canon. Could you do anything with him?”

It struck Hugh at this moment that he was eaves-dropping, but he felt perfectly incapable of moving. What richness might not be in store for him in Mrs. Owen’s reply! She was quite capable of implying, anyhow, that her tact had been at work here, too. She gave her little peal-of-bells laugh.

“You quite make a fairy-godmother of me!” she cried; “as if I have but to wave my wand, and wishes come true. What shall I say? Did a little bird tell me that everything would go smoothly, that we should all be friends again? What do you guess?”

Hugh moved quietly toward the vestry door, and entered, closing it after him. Canon Alington had just finished counting the offertory, which again was slightly Alexandrine, and was putting it away in a stout washleather bag, and he was alone.

“Look here, Dick!” said Hugh. “I want two words with you. I oughtn’t to have said all those things to you this afternoon; I’m sorry. I came down to tell you so.”

Canon Alington was quick in responses.

“My dear fellow,” he said, holding out his hand, “never say another word about it.”

They shook hands, and a discreet tap came at the outer door of the vestry by which Hugh had entered.

“That’s Mrs. Owen,” he whispered, “and she mustn’t see me. I shall go out through the church. Good-night, Dick!”

Supper at the Vicarage on Sunday evening was of the simple kind, “cold cow and coney tart,” as the Vicar habitually described it, and when it was over and Ambrose and Perpetua had gone to bed, he and his wife talked over the happy turn that events had taken.

“A wonderful woman,” said he, referring to their dea ex-machina, “and it is a privilege to know her. She will have a great influence, I already foresee, over the Graingers. Think what she did in but an hour’s talk this afternoon! Hugh’s expressions to me only just before church were very violent, very violent indeed, and now the dear fellow runs down to withdraw them completely.”

“And she is so modest about it, too,” said Agnes. “She wouldn’t even allow she had influenced Hugh at all. She had some pretty expression about a little bird having told her that everything would be smooth, and that was all.”

They were walking up and down the gravel-path outside the front door, and the Canon took his wife’s arm.

“And I should not be surprised if she has done much more than that,” he said. “I daresay she has induced Edith to destroy her paper. What a revolution to have worked in an hour or two! I have no doubt that Edith is as sorry for having written it as is Hugh for having said what he did this afternoon. Blessed indeed are the peacemakers!”

It was perhaps lucky for the Canon’s peacemaker mind that he could not see what Mrs. Owen was doing at this moment. A cigarette (the second to-day) was between her lips, and she was eagerly reading the typewritten sheets which Edith had given her.