The churchyard of Lupcombe joins the vicarage garden, and slopes downhill to it. First comes the church on the top of the hill, with its squat square tower, weather-beaten and sturdy; then the churchyard, the God's acre, in which a large proportion of the graves bear the date of the terrible fever year; then the parson's house and the doctor's; and then the irregularly flagged village street which runs to the bottom of the hill.

The parson stood by the grave of his first-born, one May afternoon.

At the time of the boy's birth the churchyard had been white with snow, and comparatively empty of graves; and when the parson had gone to church, people had grinned and bobbed to him on each side of the way, and had asked after his "good lady". The "good lady" slept by her boy now; and the two little daughters close by; and only the parson was left, with a heart dry as the turned-up earth.

He read the service with a steady voice; in the presence of this mighty visitation, who was he to complain?

"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Barnabas Thorpe buried the boy; for the gravedigger was dead.

The preacher and the parson fulfilled almost every office under the sun; a pitiless sun that beat down on the parson's uncovered head, which had whitened during the last month.

He held out his hand to Barnabas across the grave, when their work was finished.

"Thank you. My arms are old," he said. "If it hadn't been for you we should have had to do as they did in the plague year. That's the fourth to-day. Come in now, and eat and rest. Our dead can do without us, but you'll want all your strength for the living." And Barnabas followed him down the well-worn path to the garden gate.

In this strange "time of the Lord," no one even gossiped about the strangeness of the coalition, though it had been well known before that Mr. Bagshotte hated dissenters as he hated Whigs and liars.

The parson was short and spare, a clear-eyed, ruddy-complexioned English gentleman, a bit of a scholar, and a judge of good wine, but neither epicure nor bookworm. A healthy-minded man with a fund of common-sense, who had never thought too much about things spiritual, but had preached the same set of sermons year in and year out, and had christened, churched, married and buried his parishioners very comfortably for the last thirty years.

Now, in this storm of trouble, he had preached the same sermons still, till no hearers were left; when he locked the church door, and put the key in his pocket, observing merely that he had "enough to do in reading the burial service; and the people were right—while God was speaking there was no need of his comments".

Barnabas Thorpe preached on the green instead, when he had time. He prayed by the dying, too, and, as we have seen, he buried the dead. Some he saved alive. Indeed, the villagers put down every survival to his agency; and he certainly was a tower of strength, both morally and physically. Probably his influence really did prevent some deaths; for, from the evening of his first sermon, the public houses emptied.

The disorganisation and terror which the parson could not cope with, gave place to a religious "revival," which he also disapproved at first; but he had come round to Barnabas now. The preacher might be uneducated and fanatical, but he was risking his life gladly and hourly; and the parson knew a brave man when he saw one, and knew, too, the value of the example. So he and Barnabas Thorpe stood shoulder to shoulder, and worked in the presence of death, unshrinkingly, and as a matter of course; and when the parson's wife and children were struck down, the parson showed what manner of man he was; and the preacher wondered whether all the sleepy, easy-going clergymen he had rather despised had the same depths of courage in them. He thought, also, of his own wife; and reverenced his fellow-worker, as he had seldom reverenced any man before.

The parson unlocked the iron gate that opened on his garden from the churchyard; he paused a moment there and looked back.

"At this rate the churchyard will soon be fuller than the village," he remarked. "There are more brown graves than green now. There is a larger congregation there than I ever drew; but I never was much of a hand at preaching."

The roses in the garden were straggling over the path; all the flowers were suffering because the gardener was down. Mr. Bagshotte instinctively felt for a knife with which to prune them; he had been proud of his garden, and it had repaid him well; but he threw the roses he cut off in a heap behind the shrubs—it was useless now to carry them indoors. His wife, who had loved roses, needed his no more; though it crossed the parson's mind that he could barely believe—as perhaps he ought—that all the flowers of heaven (if they have flowers there) could "make up" to her for the familiar roses he had always brought—she had been very fond of them, and him.

He fetched bread and meat for his guest with his own hands. The cook had gone home, the old nurse was sobbing in the empty nursery, the housemaid was dead.

Barnabas ate without much appetite; the strain was beginning to tell, even on him. The desolate house oppressed him, and a grief he could not assuage made him miserable.

Mr. Bagshotte stood with his back to the fireplace and looked at the preacher thoughtfully: his scrutiny might have disturbed some men, but Barnabas had not a grain of self-consciousness in him.

It was strange to reflect that this tremendous experience, which was the one startling event of the old man's life, which had robbed him of all the sweetness in it—he was too manly a man to say even to himself of all that made it worth living—was probably only one of many experiences to this younger brother, whose years, shorter than his own by thirty at least, were yet probably ten times as full of incident.

"You must have seen some odd things," he remarked. "I suppose that when we are through this, we shall pick up what remains of us, and steady back into our ordinary jogtrot as best we can. But you will go away and come in for fresh upheavals and what you call 'revivals' somewhere else, and we shan't meet again."

"No," said the preacher. "Very like we shan't—till the day when Christ's kingdom comes."

His blue eyes brightened at the thought of that time,—which thought, indeed, was always more or less present with him.

"H'm," said the parson. "It has come to a good many poor souls this week. I wonder——" It was on the tip of his tongue to say, "I wonder what they make of it!" It was so difficult to imagine his stolid L——shire parishioners translated into a purely spiritual atmosphere; but the observation struck him as unclerical, and he bit it off short.

"Mind you, I don't like ranting, and never shall," he said. "But there's no doubt men had better turn in their despair to God than to gin or begging; and a time like this seems bound to bring out either the beast or the angel in us." He paused, and took snuff emphatically.

"I hope I should have stood to my guns," he resumed; "but all the same, if it hadn't been for you, the beast would have got the best of it in the village. Go on eating, man! You ought to eat at the rate you work. I'd offer you beer, only I suppose you won't touch it. I heard you stigmatising it as 'accursed poison' on the Green last week. You're wrong, you know, quite wrong."

Mr. Bagshotte was usually a deliberate and placidly silent man, but grief made him curiously restless and talkative.

Barnabas lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at his host, who had just buried his son.

"If you'd felt that drink devil tearing inside you, you'd not care about playing with him; nor about seeing others do it," he said. "But my preaching isn't to you, nor such as you, sir. I've not felt called to speak to them above me, except once." He stopped rather abruptly, and got up.

"I've done, thank 'ee; an' there's some one coming up the garden. Ay, it's Polly Taylor, an' she looks as if it was pressing."

He walked to the window; and the child, seeing him, poured out an urgent message, interspersed with sobs.

Perhaps nothing could have more strongly set forth the general topsy-turvyness than the fact of the revivalist preacher's receiving a call through the rectory window, with the parson standing by unsurprised.

"Her mother's took bad an' her brother's dead," said Barnabas; "but"—with a moment's hesitation—"will ye no gi'e yourself an hour, sir? I'll manage."

The old parson straightened himself, and took up his hat and stick.

"Not now," he said. "When the bullets have stopped flying, we'll count our dead." So the two went into the village street together.

Barnabas Thorpe, with his weather-beaten face and long swinging stride; Mr. Bagshotte, trotting along by his side in clerical hat and gaitered legs—these two were the most familiar of sights now; brave men both, who, whatever their differences, would never duck their heads under fire, whether visible or invisible.

A starved dog, whose owner lay in the churchyard, crept after them whining, and thrust his nose under the preacher's hand. Dogs always followed Barnabas, who, from his childhood, had been bound by a specially strong tie to the brute creation. Already he had been adopted as master by four cats and two mongrel dogs, as he remembered with rather rueful amusement.

"Go home!—I've no room for ye," he said; but, on the dog's explaining that he had no home, that nobody had any room for him, and that he was sick of being stoned, his legs having got so shaky that he hadn't energy to get out of the way, Barnabas relented and picked him up. It was absolutely impossible to the man to pass on on the other side in any case, whether advisable or not, as his fellow-worker remarked. Mr. Bagshotte's liking for Barnabas was, sometimes, touched by something that would have been pity if the preacher had not been too strong a man to feel sorry for.

"A bit of a fatalist (though he doesn't know it), a bit of a fanatic, and a bit of a saint, with an inconveniently big heart," thought the parson. "The man gives the saint some trouble, I fancy. I wonder what his wife is like!"

Three weeks later the "bullets" began to slacken.

There was a paragraph in a London paper describing the terrible scourge that had devastated the little northern village—reducing the population to less than one half of its original number, and sweeping away whole families at once. Mr. Bagshotte, the vicar, had lost his wife and three children, the report said; and several of his contemporaries, who remembered Bagshotte at the university, wondered whether this was the same man they used to know, and, if so, why he had buried himself in the country.

Mr. Bagshotte himself read the meagre account with rather a sad smile. It would mean so remarkably little to the people who did not live in the village; and the village had been his world for so long.

He had been essentially a domestic man, loving the routine of everyday life, absolutely happy with his wife and children, whom he had surrounded with little old-fashioned tender observances. He had lost touch with the friends of his youth; though, his friendships being of sturdy growth, he had prided himself on not forgetting them. He was alone now, so far as companionship went; and, healthy-minded as he was, he got to dread the emptiness of the rooms, and would cheat the loneliness that awaited him by hurrying up the back way, avoiding the drawing-room door, which used always to open at the sound of his footstep.

Possibly he came to feel his losses more when the pressure of excitement was over.

It would have been unworthy to pray for death. A man has no business to whine for a speedy release because his duty has become irksome; but he was conscious of some disappointment. He had believed, when he had buried his son, that his own turn would come when the shots began to "thin". He was willing to wait till then, indeed it would never have done for his wife to have been left alone; but now, when the shops were opening again, when the world was regaining its balance, and men, meeting in the street, talked of weather and trade, and discovered that the "Last Day" was, after all, not so very imminent, the old man was conscious of a slightly surprised disappointment. "The king can do no wrong," but he had hoped things might have been otherwise ordered.

He was just turning in at his own gate one Sunday morning; the usual Sunday services had begun again, and he was considering how to fill up the gaps in the church band, when some one called him by his Christian name.

He turned, frowning slightly, and a good deal surprised; then his face changed.

He knew the stranger at once; the twelve years that lay between this and their last meeting seemed to come like a haze before his eyes. He rubbed them vigorously, but he had no doubt as to who it was.

"Deane! Charles Deane!" he cried.

"I saw it in the paper, and I came at once. My dear old friend!" cried the new-comer; and the two men grasped each other silently by the hand.

It is one of the advantages of riches that good impulses can be carried out with comparative ease, while they are still hot.

Mr. Bagshotte threw open the gate with a jerk.

"Come in, come in. You are more than welcome," he said. "To think that you should have come like this! It's—it's extraordinarily good of you, Deane."

The old man was more touched than he would have cared to show. He had admired his brilliant friend immensely in the olden days; but he had, somehow, hardly expected that Charles Deane would have remembered him.

"I wish she could have welcomed you. We seldom had any visitors, and she would have enjoyed it so," he said simply. "So you saw it in the paper and came! I had fancied I was quite forgotten."

Mr. Deane put his hand for a moment on the parson's shoulder. "But one doesn't forget one's oldest friends," he said; and the sympathy in his musical voice was good to hear.

It certainly was fortunate that he had come on the spur of the moment, before anything had occurred to prevent him.

Mr. Bagshotte led the way into his study, with a brighter look on his face than it had worn for a long time.

On opening the door, he found Barnabas Thorpe awaiting him.

"They told me that ye would be out o' church in a minute, so I just waited for 'ee," the preacher began; then stopped short suddenly.

Who was this? this stranger who was yet not a stranger? Who was this who had stolen Margaret's eyes?

Barnabas actually flinched; the likeness hurt him, combined, as it was, with the utter scorn and distrust that those eyes expressed.

"You are my wife's father!" he cried abruptly, his thoughts treading on each other's heels, and tumbling confusedly through his brain while he spoke.

Mr. Deane had turned rather white. Like Meg, his colour went when he was very angry. He flicked the dust off his boots with his riding whip; then looked up with a fine smile.

"It is a little late to remember that she had a father," he said. "She forgot that she was my child when she became your wife. The best that can happen to her now is that she should continue to forget it—for ever, if possible. I sincerely hope it may be possible—for her own sake. No one will disturb your possession."

He turned away when he had spoken. He could not condescend to quarrel with this man.

"God bless my soul!" cried the parson. "Mr. Deane's daughter your wife; but—but——"

"But she was never born for the likes o' me, eh?" said the preacher. "Is that what you'd say, parson? It's her own flesh an' blood she should ha' clung to, when they miscalled her, an' cast her out? an' I should ha' shrugged my shoulders an' walked away?" His heart was hot within him. Mr. Deane's voice and face and manner, the strong indissoluble tie of blood that made Meg his, even when he denied her, awoke the man's fierce jealousy, and awoke also a certain sore despondency that he himself hardly understood.

"An' so ye'll not disturb me?" he went on slowly. The two men's eyes met for a second, and Barnabas Thorpe laughed rather grimly. "An' that's a true word," he said. "I am no' o' your kind, thank God; but happen I know one thing. I can take care o' the woman who is mine."