Mrs. Fellowes, meanwhile, was having a most unsatisfactory time with the Park people; it seemed absolutely impossible to dig into them or to be of any service to them. They were wearing her to skin and bone, and she was meditating a change somewhere or other, when one day, crossing the hall just after lunch, she heard a knock at the door and opened it herself.

She found Mr. and Mrs. Waring standing in their normal attitude and looking frightfully embarrassed; she saw at a glance that they looked queerer than usual, and not feeling equal just at that minute to face them alone, she carried them straight off to the dining-room.

“Ah, the Nineteenth Century, I perceive,” said Mr. Waring as soon as he found himself in a chair, with his hat grasped in one hand and the other on the edge of his knee with the fingers stretched out and feeling nervously in a baulked way.

“In that last article of St. George Mivart’s,” continued Mr. Waring, “we find a marked evidence of the deteriorating effect of any special bias on a man’s mind. If this man were not an ardent churchman of the Romish persuasion I have always thought he might have done well in literary science, but as it is—it seems to me he has so much confused the thread of his discourse as to render it comparatively valueless by weaving into it, with most conscientious persistence, stray fragments of the deductions he has drawn from his own crude creed. This demands, on the reader’s part, a searching, sifting process, which the intrinsic value of the gentleman’s articles to my mind hardly warrants.”

“Ah, you like your science neat,” said the rector, “so possibly might I, if I had time to collect my own facts.”

“Ah, but for work that must last, time and an undivided mind are necessities, no matter what the cause may be that clouds the brain.”

He looked at his wife, and his floating, near-sighted eyes grew dim with tender pain, and the tendril-like movement of his fingers increased.

He forgot St. George Mivart, and all at once it occurred to him why he had come.

“Poor old boy, his punishment is horribly out of proportion to his deserts,” thought the rector, as, in the pause that followed, he caught snatches of the low-toned talk of the women, with Gwen’s name entering largely into it, and saw Mrs. Waring’s face fixed on his own wife with pathetic shy yearning, not veering round to her husband with covert eagerness, as it used to do.

Mr. Fellowes caught himself echoing the other husband’s sigh, and he laughed as the absurdity of the situation struck him.

“This must be stopped,” he thought, “it grows mawkish. I wonder if they have forgotten to feed—more than likely. Ruth, have you asked Mrs. Waring if she has lunched?”

“Indeed I haven’t!” she cried, “I don’t know what I can have been thinking about.”

“Oh, please, Mrs. Fellowes,” stammered the little woman, then her eyes turned towards their magnet.

Mr. Waring was at her side and with her hand in his, with a speed that made Mrs. Fellowes gasp.

“The fact is, Mrs. Fellowes,” he explained heroically, “we were both a little forgetful, we—we—” he paused painfully and gulped. “Ah!——I”—

He repented the word sadly, it was the first time his conscience had forced him to separate the two, and it hurt him. “Yes, I was much absorbed in my work—and my wife, I think she is not very well.”

“I am quite well, dear,” she murmured.

“Ah, dearest, I doubt it. I thought some quinine might be beneficial, Mrs. Fellowes. In fact, that was the primary motive of our call.”

“Give her some claret for the present, and make her eat something, wine and meat are as good as quinine any day.”

Mrs. Waring was the most docile creature breathing, she swallowed obediently everything set before her, when suddenly a little tremble ran all down her and shook her gently, and she let her fork drop with a little clash.

She had caught sight just over the sideboard of one of Brydon’s sketches of Gwen, that she had sent Mrs. Fellowes.

Her husband had not seen the picture, so he only pressed her knife hand gently, and murmured, “Nerves!”

She went back obediently to her meal, and if they had given her the whole of a chicken and a quart of claret, she would have swallowed both without a murmur, so long as they let her get finished and go close up to that picture.

Mr. Waring’s meal, on the contrary, was very interesting to him, and he enjoyed it with a zest that set him playing at a quite new and charming departure in classification. A graceful pretty house-mother moving on the field of his vision, and supplying every unspoken want of his, was a pleasing variation.

“A charming type, this serving woman,” he reflected, regarding her with gentle favour, “charming. By no means a unique or even an unusual one, but really quite charming and pleasant to observe. In that woman the maternal instinct will be found in a very advanced state of development—and yet, if I recollect aright,” he started, frowning, and pausing, with a morsel of meat on his fork, he contemplated her curiously, “Yes, I believe my recollections are accurate, she has never had any children and probably, after this lapse of time, will not produce any. Very strange indeed, very strange, another of those most puzzling instances of Nature’s waste.”

He sighed and reflected a little on Mrs. Fellowes as she helped his wife to cream, then he went rather sadly to his tart, feeling a slight tinge of contempt for Nature’s inconsistency.

When Mrs. Waring had consumed as much nourishment as her entertainers thought fit for her, Mr. Fellowes went over to the sideboard, unhooked the sketch, and propped it against the claret jug.

“The colouring is good, isn’t it?” he said. “Gwen sent it to us last week.”

Mrs. Waring threw up her head and looked at the rector’s wife, then her face flooded with pink, and there came a pain into her heart that she had never felt before. For the first time in her seven-and-thirty years this little woman was jealous.

“Gwen gave it!” she repeated. “Henry, do you think Gwen would give us one?”

There was a perceptible choke in her voice, and she put up her little hand to her throat with a swift movement.

“My love!” he said in a rather frightened way, “we could hardly ask our daughter for such a very valuable present.”

“I suppose we could not,” she said, with sweet humility.

“My reasonable, my docile one!” he thought, with tender satisfaction, “better a thousand times than any other female type, serving or otherwise.”

He might have felt more disturbed if he had had the merest ghost of a notion as to the causes of her humility, which had less to do with him than he would altogether have relished. With all this congestion of novel emotion the woman was losing her pristine transparency.

“What are your plans for the afternoon?” asked the rector. “You know that even the ordinary decencies of civilization have to be shunted in a parson’s life, I must be off in five minutes. Are you on for a walk, Waring?”

“I!—Oh, thank you, but, we—I—we—” he caught nervously on to his wife’s eyes, “we—we are very much engaged just now. We just called concerning this matter of quinine, and we have already absorbed too much of your time; untimely visitors are a keen trial—my wife and I have suffered much from this form of affliction.”

The rector laughed.

“Visitors are a brutal bane, ninety per cent. of them, but you two are most marked exceptions. We can go as far as the Park, anyway, for that is on my way, and I know my wife has designs on yours—you won’t get her back much before dinner time.”

Mr. Waring turned round with a start.

“Is this the case?” he asked blankly.

“I would like to stay,” said Mrs. Waring softly, but she hung her head and did not look at her husband.

He looked at her, however, and his brows lifted themselves. He turned with solemnity to Mrs. Fellowes.

“Pray consider this question of quinine,” he said, “and let us know the result—our experience is quite insufficient to go on.”

“You are quite welcome to all mine,” said Mrs. Fellowes laughing.

He turned to his wife again. “Good-bye, my love. I hope I shall be able to get on with my work, but—ahem—this upsets one sadly.”

Mrs. Fellowes went to her husband in the hall just then and they were alone.

“This is quite unusual, love—are you wise to remain?” he said.

Mrs. Waring’s eyes wandered to Gwen’s picture.

“I would like to stay,” she said, then suddenly she bent towards him and the pink deepened on her cheeks, “but I will go if you like.”

“I wish you to do just as you like yourself, love.”

He loosed his hand gently from her clasp and followed Mrs. Fellowes into the hall, his fingers twitching.

In an instant she was after him and making for her hat when Mrs. Fellowes caught her.

“Come to the door and see them off,” she remarked innocently, drawing her arm through her own.

When she had seen them off the premises, Mrs. Fellowes shut her guest up with the picture and went to dress, then she scurried her off to the village, where they spent a rather remarkable two hours.

Mrs. Fellowes’ companion was first discovered by an urchin who was making mud pies in a gutter. At the first shock of his find, he gave a whoop and turned a summersault back into the dust, then he uplifted himself and fled with the news, despatching scouts to right and left on his progress.

When the ladies reached the village they found it all agog, every door was full of faces, and the howls of scrubbing infancy arose from every yard.

Mrs. Waring looked shy and twitched a good deal, but on the whole she bore herself gallantly.

The mothers embarrassed her, they seemed to expect conversation, and this was even the case with the children; she could just smile at them, however, and be silent. It was among the babies she shone, not, indeed, in her mode of holding them—she did that with her fingers, delicately, as if they were pens—but she got so eager over them, so full of interest, asked so many anxious questions as to their appetites, and gave such amazing hints concerning their management that she made an impression on the village such as astonished the oldest inhabitant, and set the women’s tongues wagging at a rate to surprise even their husbands.

It was an event, an epoch-making day in the village of Waring, when the squire’s wife stepped in bodily presence in and out of its houses, and disseminated useful knowledge concerning the human infant.

When Gwen heard of it, in the same letter that told her to send her mother a sketch of herself without delay, she laughed sarcastically.

“This is dishonest of Mrs. Fellowes!” she cried with a little stamp, “how dare she make all this fresh phase of lunacy into a pathetic story? There is a ring of false sentiment through the whole business.”