When Stephen Clode left the Town House after his interview with Laura, he was in a state of exaltation--lifted completely out of his ordinary cool and calculating self by what had happened. It was raining, but he had gone some distance before he remarked it, and even then he did not at once put up his umbrella, but strode along through the darkness, his thoughts in a whirl of triumph and excitement. The crisis had come suddenly, but he had not been found unequal to it. He had gone in through the gates despondent, and come out in joy. He had pitted himself against his rival, and had had the best of it. He had wooed, and, almost in spite of his mistress, had won!

He did not for the first few moments consider whether his altercation with the rector was likely to have unpleasant consequences, nor did he trouble himself about the manner in which he was to do Laura's bidding. Such considerations would come later--with the reaction. For the present they did not occur to him. It was enough that Laura might be his--that she never could be the rector's.

He felt the need, in his present excited mood, of some one to speak to, and instead of turning into his own lodgings he passed on to the reading-room, a large, barely furnished room, looking upon the top of the town, and used as a club by the leading townsfolk and a few of the local magnates who lived near. He entered it, and, to his surprise, found the archdeacon seated under the naked gas-burners, interested in the "Times." The sight filled him with astonishment, for it was seldom the county members used the room after sunset.

"Why, Mr. Archdeacon," he said--his tongue naturally hung loose at the moment, and a bonhomie, difficult to assume at another time, came easily to him now--"what in the world brings you here at this hour?"

The archdeacon laid down his paper. "Upon my word I think I was half asleep," he said. "I am in for the 'Free Foresters'' supper. I thought the hour was half-past six, and came into town accordingly, whereas I find it is half-past seven. I have been here the best part of three-quarters of an hour killing time."

"But I thought that the rector always said grace for the 'Free Foresters,' the curate answered in some surprise.

"It has been the custom for them to ask him," the archdeacon replied cautiously. "By the way you did it last year, did you not?"

"Yes, for Mr. Williams. He was confined to his room."

"I thought so. Well, this year these foolish people seem to have taken a fancy not to have the rector, and they came to me. I tried to persuade them to have him, but it was no good. And so," the archdeacon added, in a lower tone, "I thought it would look less like a slight if I came than if any other clergyman--you, for instance--were the clerical guest."

"To be sure," said the curate warmly. "It was most thoughtful of you."

The archdeacon hitched his chair a little nearer the fire. He felt the influence of the curate's sympathy. The latter had said little, but his manner warmed the old gentleman's heart, and his tongue also grew more loose. "I wonder whether you know," he said genially, rubbing his hands up and down his knees, which he was gently toasting, and looking benevolently at his companion, "how near you were to having the living, Clode?"

"Do you mean Claversham?" replied the curate, experiencing a kind of shock at this reference to the subject so near his heart.

"Yes, of course."

"I never thought I had a chance of it!"

"You had so good a chance," responded the archdeacon, nodding his head wisely, "that only one thing stood between you and it."

"May I ask what that was?" the curate rejoined, his heart beating fast.

"A promise. The earl had promised his old friend that he should have this living. Lord Dynmore told me so himself, the last time I saw him. That would be nearly a year ago, when poor Williams was already ailing."

"Well, that I supposed to be the case," Clode answered, his tone one of disappointment. "But I do not quite see how I was affected by it--more, I mean, than others, archdeacon."

"That is what I am going to tell you, only it must not go farther," the archdeacon answered. "Lord Dynmore told me of this promise À propos of a resolution he had just come to--namely, that, subject to it, he intended in future to give his livings (he has seven in all, you know) to the curate, wherever the latter had been two years at least in the parish, and stood well with it. I am not sure that I agree with him; but he is a conscientious man, though an odd one, and he had formed the opinion that that was the right course. So, come now, if anything should happen to Lindo you would certainly drop into it. I am not quite sure," added the archdeacon confidentially, "though no one likes Lindo better than I do, that yours would not have been the better appointment."

The curate disclaimed this so warmly and loyally that the archdeacon was more than ever pleased with him; and, half-past seven striking, they parted at the door of the reading-room on the best of terms with one another. The archdeacon crossed to his supper and speech, and the curate turned into his rooms, and, throwing himself into the big leather chair before the fire, fixed his eyes on the glowing coals, and began to think--to apply what he had just heard to what he had known before.

A living? He had got to get a living. And without capital to invest in one, or the favor of a patron, how was it to be done? The bishop? He had no claim there. He had not been long enough in the diocese, and he knew nothing of the bishop's wife. There was only one living he could get, only one living upon which he had a claim, and that was Claversham. It all came back to that--with this added, that he had now a stronger motive than ever for ejecting Lindo from it, and the absolute knowledge to boot that, Lindo ejected, he would be his successor.

Stephen Clode's face grew dark and gloomy as he reached this stage in his reflections. He believed that the rector was enjoying what he had no right to enjoy, but still he would fain have had no distinct part in depriving him of it. He would have much preferred to stand by and, save by a word here and there, by little acts scarcely palpable, and quite incapable of proof--do nothing himself to injure him. He knew what loyalty was, and would fain have been loyal in big things at least. But he did not see how it could be done. He fancied that the stir against the rector was dying away. Bonamy had not moved. Gregg was a coward, and of this matter of the "Free Foresters" he thought nothing. Probably they would return to their allegiance another year, and among the poor the rector's liberality would soon make friends for him. Altogether, the curate, getting up and walking the room restlessly and with a knitted brow, was forced to the conviction that, if he would be helped, he must help himself, and that now was the time. The iron must be struck before it cooled. Something must be done.

But what? Clode's mind reverted first to the discharged servant, and discussed more than one way in which he might be used. There was an amount of danger, however, in tampering with him which the thinker's astuteness did not fail to note, and which led him presently to determine to leave Felton alone. Perhaps he had made as much capital out of him as could be made with safety.

From him the curate's thoughts passed naturally to the packet of letters in the cupboard at the rectory, the letters which he had once held in his hand, and which he could not but believe would prove the rector's knowledge of the fraud he was committing. Those letters! Clode, walking up and down the room, pishing and pshawing from time to time, could not disentangle his thoughts from them. The narrow chance which had prevented him reading them before somehow made him feel the more certain of their value now--the more anxious to hold them again in his hands.

Were they still in the cupboard, he wondered. He had retained, not with any purpose, but in pure inadvertence, the key which he had mentioned to the rector; and he had it now. He took it from the mantel-shelf, toyed with it, dropped it into his pocket. Then he took up his hat, and was going abruptly from the room when the little servant who waited on him met him. She was bringing up his simple dinner. The curate's first impulse was to order it to be taken down and kept warm for him. His second, to resume his seat and eat it hastily. When he had finished--he could not have said an hour later what he had had--he took his hat again and went out.

Two minutes saw him at the rectory door, where he was just in time to meet the rector going out. Lindo's face flushed as he saw who his visitor was, and there was more than a suspicion of haughtiness in his tone as he greeted him. "Good-evening," he said. "Do you want to see me, Mr. Clode?"

"If you please," the curate answered simply. "May I come in?"

For answer, Lindo silently held the door open, and Clode passed through the hall into the library. He was in the habit of entering this room a dozen times a week, but he never did so after leaving his own small lodgings without being struck by its handsome proportions, by the grave harmonious color of its calf-lined walls, and the air of studious quiet which always reigned within them. Of all the rector's possessions he envied him this room the most. The very sight of the shaded lamp standing on the revolving bookcase at the corner of the hearth, and of the little table beside it, which still bore the rector's coffee-cup and a tiny silver ewer and basin, aroused his spleen afresh. But he gave no outward sign of this. He stood with his hat in one hand, his other leaning on the table, and his head slightly bent. "Rector," he said, "I am afraid I behaved very badly this afternoon."

"I certainly thought your manner rather odd," replied the rector shortly. But he was half disarmed already.

"I was annoyed, much annoyed, about a private matter," the curate proceeded in an even, rather despondent tone. "It is a matter about which I expect I shall presently have to take your opinion. But for the present I am not at liberty to name it. However, I was in trouble, and I foolishly wreaked my annoyance upon the first person I came across."

"That was, unfortunately, myself," said Lindo, smiling.

"It would have been very unfortunate indeed for me, if you were as some rectors I could name," the curate replied gravely, still with his eyes cast down. "As it is--well, I think you will accept my apology."

"Say no more about it," answered the rector hastily. There was nothing he hated so much as a scene. "Have a cup of coffee, my dear fellow. I will ring for a cup and saucer." And, before the curate could protest, Lindo was at the bell and had rung it, his manner almost the manner of a boy.

"Sit down, sit down!" he continued. "Sarah, a cup and saucer, please."

"But you were going out," protested the curate, as he complied.

"Only to the post with some letters," the rector explained. "I will send Sarah instead."

Clode sprang up again, a peculiar flush on his dark cheek, and a glint as of excitement in his eye.

"No, no," he said, "I am putting you out. If you were going to the post, pray go. You can leave me here and come back to me, if that be all."

The rector hesitated, his letters in his hand. He might send Sarah. But it wanted a few minutes only of nine o'clock, and, besides, he did not approve of the maids going out so late. "Well, I think I will do as you say," he answered, feeling that compliance was perhaps the truest politeness; "if you are sure that you do not mind."

"I beg you will," the curate said warmly.

The cup and saucer being at that moment brought in, the rector nodded assent. "Very well; I shall not be two minutes," he said. "Take care of yourself while I am away."

The curate, left alone, muttered, "No, you will be at least four minutes, my friend!" and waited, with his cup poised, until he heard the outer door closed. Then he set it down. Assuring himself by a steady look that the windows were shuttered, he rose and, quietly crossing the room, as a man might who wished to examine a book, he stood before the little cupboard among the shelves. Perhaps, because he had done the thing before, he did not hesitate. His hand was as steady as it had ever been. If it shook at all it was with eagerness. His task was so easy and so devoid of danger, under the circumstances, that he even smiled darkly, as he set the key in the lock, at the thought of the more clumsy burglar whom he had detected there. He turned the key and opened the door. Nothing could be more simple. The packet he wanted lay just where he had looked to find it. He took it out and dropped it into his breast-pocket, and, long before the time which he had given himself was up, was back in his chair by the fire, with his coffee-cup on his knee.

He might have been expected to feel some surprise at his own coolness. But, as a fact, his thoughts were otherwise employed. He was longing, with intense eagerness, for the moment when he might take the next step--when he might open the packet and secure the weapon he needed. He fingered the letters as they lay in their hiding place, and could scarcely refrain from taking them out and examining them there and then. When Lindo returned, and broke into the room with a hearty word about the haste he had made, the curate's answer betrayed no self-consciousness. On the contrary, he rather underplayed his part, his eye and voice being for, a moment so absent as to surprise his host. The next instant he was aware of this, and conducted himself so warily during the half-hour he remained that he entirely erased from the rector's mind the unlucky impression of the afternoon.

By half-past nine he was back in his own room, at his table, his hat thrown this way, his umbrella that. It took him but a feverish moment to turn up the lamp and settle himself in his chair. Then he took out the packet of letters, and, untying the string which bound them together, he opened the first--there were only six of them in all. This was the one which he had partially read on the former occasion--Messrs. Gearns & Baker's first letter. He read it through now at his leisure, without interruption, once, twice, thrice, and with a long breath laid it down again, and sat gazing, with knitted brows, into the shadow beyond the lamp's influence. There was not a word in it, not an expression, which helped him; nothing to show the recipient that he was not the Reginald Lindo for whom the living was intended.

The curate sat awhile before he opened the second, and that one he read more quickly. He dealt in the same way with the next, and the next. When, in a short minute or two, he had read them all and they lay in a disordered pile before him--some folded and some unfolded, just as they had dropped from his hands--he leaned back in his chair, and, folding his arms, sat frowning darkly into vacancy. There was not a word to help him in any one of them, not a sentence which even tended to convict the rector. He had been at all his pains for nothing. He had----

The sound of a raised voice asking for him below, and the hasty tread of a foot mounting the stairs two at a time, roused him with a start from the dream of disappointment. In a second he was erect, motionless, and listening, his hand upon and half covering the letters. A hasty knock on the outside of his door, and the touch of fingers on the handle, seemed at the last moment to nerve him to action. It was all but too late. As the rector came hurriedly into the room, the curate, his face pallid, and the drops of perspiration standing on his brow, swept the letters aside and drew a newspaper partly over them. "What--what is it?" he muttered, stooping forward, his hands on the table.

The rector was too full of the news he had brought to observe the other's agitation, the more as the lamp was between them, and his eyes were dazzled by the light. "Why, what do you think Bonamy has done?" he answered excitedly, as he closed the door behind him. He was breathing quickly with the haste he had made, and, uninvited, he dropped into a chair.

"What?" said the curate hoarsely. He dared not look down at the table lest he should direct the other's eyes to what lay there, but he was racked as he stood there with the fear that some damning corner of the paper, some scrap of the writing, should still be visible. The shame of possible discovery poured like a flood over his soul. "What is it?" he repeated mechanically. He had not yet recovered enough presence of mind to wonder why the rector should have paid this untimely call.

"He has served me with a writ!" Lindo replied, his face hot with haste and indignation, his lips curling. "At this hour of the night, too! A writ for trespass in driving out the sheep from the churchyard."

"A writ!" the curate echoed. "It is very late for serving writs."

"Yes. His clerk, who handed it to me--he came five minutes after you left--apologized, and took the blame for that on himself, saying he had forgotten to deliver it on leaving the office."

"For trespass!" said the curate stupidly. What a fool he had been to meddle with those letters! Why had he not had a little patience? Here, after all, was the catastrophe for which he had been longing.

"Yes, in the Queen's Bench Division, and all the rest of it!" replied the rector; and then he waited to hear what the curate had to say.

But Clode had nothing to say, except "What shall you do?"

"Fight!" replied Lindo briskly, getting up and approaching the table. "That of course. And it was about that I came to you. I do not think there is any lawyer here I should like to employ. Did not you tell me the other day who the archdeacon's were? Some people in Birmingham, I think?"

"I think I did," the curate answered. He had overcome his first fear, and, as he spoke, looked down at the table, on which he was still leaning. His hasty movement had disordered his own papers, but none of the tell-tale letters were visible so far as he could see. But what if the rector took up the newspaper? Or casually put it aside? The curate grew hot again, despite his great self-control. He felt himself on the edge of a precipice down which he dared not cast his eye.

"Well, can you give me their address?" the rector continued.

"Certainly!" the curate answered. Indeed he leapt at the suggestion, for it seemed to offer some chance of escape--at least a way by which he might rid himself of his visitor.

"Just write it down, that is a good fellow, then," said the rector, unconscious of what was passing in his mind.

The curate said he would, and tore off at random---the rector was leaning his hand on the newspaper, and might at any moment be taken with a fancy to raise it--the back sheet of the first stray note that came to his fingers, and wrote the address upon it. "There, that is it," he said; and as he gave it to Lindo--he had written it standing up and stooping--he almost pushed him away from the table. "That will serve you, I think. They may be trusted, I am told. The best you can do, I am sure, will be to place the matter in their hands at once."

"I will write before I sleep!" the younger clergyman answered heartily. "You cannot think how the narrowness of these people provokes me! But I will not keep you now. I see you are busy. Come round early in the morning, will you, and talk it over?"

"I will come the moment I have had breakfast," the curate answered, making no attempt to detain his visitor.

The rector thereupon going, he stood eyeing the newspaper askance until the other's footsteps died away on the pavement outside. Then he swept it off and stood contemplating the half-dozen letters with abhorrence. He loathed and detested them. They had suddenly become to him such an incubus as his victim's body becomes to the murderer. The desire which had tempted him to the crime was gone, and he felt them only as a burden. They were the visible proof of his shame. To keep them was to become a thief, and yet he shrank with a nervous terror quite new and strange to him from the task of returning them--of going to the study at the rectory and putting them back in the cupboard. It had been easy to get possession of them; but to return them seemed a task so thankless, and withal so perilous, that he quailed before it. With shaking hands he bundled them together and locked them in the lowest drawer of his writing table. He would return them to-morrow.