Oddly enough, the rector's first thought on rising next morning was of his curate. He had expected, as we have seen, that Clode would call before bedtime. Disappointed in this, he still felt so certain that the curate would hasten as soon as possible to offer his sympathy and assistance that after breakfast he repaired to his study for the express purpose of receiving him. To find one friend in need is good, but to find two is better. The young clergyman felt, as people in trouble of a certain kind do feel, that though he had told Jack all about it, it would be a relief to tell Stephen all about it also; the more as Jack, whom he had told, was his personal friend, while Clode was identified with the place and his unabated confidence and esteem--of retaining which the rector made no doubt--would go some way toward soothing the latter's wounded pride.

It was well, however, that Lindo, sitting down at his writing-table to await his visitor, found there some scattered notes upon which he could employ his thoughts, and which without any great concentration of mind he could form into a sermon. For otherwise his time would have been wasted. Ten o'clock came, and eleven, and half-past eleven; but no curate.

Mr. Clode, in fact, was engaged elsewhere. About half-past ten he turned briskly into the drive leading to Mrs. Hammond's house and walked up it at a good pace, with the step of a man who has news to tell, and is going to tell it. The morning was bright and sunny, the air crisp and fresh, yet not too cold. The gravel crunched pleasantly under his feet, while the hoar-frost melting on the dark green leaves of the laurels bordered his path with a million gems as brilliant as evanescent. Possibly the pleasure he took in these things, possibly some thought of his own, lent animation to the curate's face and figure as he strode along. At any rate, Miss Hammond, meeting him suddenly at a turn in the approach, saw a change in him, and, reading the signs aright, blushed.

"Well?" she said, smiling a question as she held out her hand. They had scarcely been alone together since the afternoon when the rector's inopportune call had brought about an understanding between them.

"Well?" he answered, retaining her hand. "What is it, Laura?"

"I thought you were going to tell me," she said, glancing up with shy assurance. The morning air was not fresher. She was so bright and piquant in her furs and with her dazzling complexion, that other eyes than her lover's might have been pardoned for likening her to the frost drops on the laurels. At any rate, she sparkled as they did.

He looked down at her, fond admiration in his eyes. Had he not come up on purpose to see her?

"I think it is all right," he said, in a slightly lower tone. "I think I may answer for it, Laura, that we shall not have much longer to wait."

She gazed at him, seeming for the moment startled and taken by surprise. "Have you heard of a living, then?" she murmured, her eyes wide, her breath coming and going.

He nodded.

"Where?" she asked, in the same low tone. "You do not mean--here!"

He nodded again.

"At Claversham!" she exclaimed. "Then will he have to go, really?"

"I think he will," Clode replied, a glow of triumph warming his dark face and kindling his eyes. "When Lord Dynmore left here yesterday he drove straight to Mr. Bonamy's. You hardly believe it, do you? Well, it is true, for I had it from a sure source. And, that being so, I do not think Lindo will have much chance against such an alliance. It is not as if he had many friends here, or had got on well with the people."

"The poor people like him," she urged.

"Yes," Clode answered sharply. "He has spent money among them. It was not his own, you see."

It was a brutal thing to say, and she cast a glance of gentle reproof at him. She did not remonstrate, however, but, slightly changing the subject, asked, "But even if Mr. Lindo goes, are you sure of the living?"

"I think so," he answered, smiling confidently down at her.

She looked puzzled. "How do you know?" she asked. "Did Lord Dynmore promise it to you?"

"No; I wish he had," he answered. "All the same, I think I am fairly sure of it without the promise." And then he related to her what the archdeacon had told him as to Lord Dynmore's intention of presenting the curates in future. "Now do you see, Laura?" he asked.

"Yes, I see," she answered, looking down and absently poking a hole in the gravel with the point of her umbrella.

"And you are content?"

"Yes," she answered, looking up brightly from a little dream of the rectory as it should be, when feminine taste had transformed it with the aid of Persian rugs and old china and the hundred knickknacks which are half a woman's life--"Yes, I am content, Mr. Clode."

"Say 'Stephen.'"

"I am quite content, Stephen," she answered obediently, a bright blush for a moment mingling with her smile.

He was about to make some warm rejoinder, when the sound of footsteps approaching from the house diverted his attention, and he looked up. The new-comer was Mrs. Hammond, also on her way into the town. She waved her hand to him. "Good morning," she cried in her cheery voice--"you are just the person I wanted to see, Mr. Clode. This is good luck. Now, how is he?"

"Who? Mrs. Hammond," said the curate, quite taken by surprise.

"Who?" she replied warmly, reproach in her tone. She was a kind-hearted woman, and the scene in her drawing-room had really cost her a few minutes' sleep. "Why, Mr. Lindo, to be sure. Whom else should I mean? I suppose you went in last night at once and told him how much we all sympathized with him? Indeed, I hope you did not leave him until you saw him well to bed, for I am sure he was hardly fit to be left alone, poor fellow!"

Mr. Clode stood silent, and looked troubled. Really, if it had occurred to him, he would have called to see Lindo. But it had not occurred to him, after what had happened--perhaps because he had been busied about things which "seemed worth while." He regretted now, since Mrs. Hammond seemed to think it so much a matter of course, that he had not done so; the more as the omission compelled him to choose his side earlier than he need have done. However, it was too late now. So he shook his head. "I have not seen him, Mrs. Hammond," he said gravely. "I have not been to the rectory."

"What! you have not seen him?" she cried in amazement.

"No, I have not," he answered, a slight tinge of hauteur in his manner. After all, he reflected that he would have found it painful to play another part before Laura after disclosing so much of his mind to her. "What is more, Mrs. Hammond," he continued, "I am not anxious to see him; for, to tell you the truth, I fear that the meeting could only be a painful one."

"Why, you do not mean to say," the lady answered in a low, awe-stricken voice, "that you think he knew anything about it, Mr. Clode?"

"At any rate," the curate replied firmly, "I cannot acquit him."

"Not acquit him!--Mr. Lindo!" she stammered.

"No, I cannot," Clode replied, striving to express in his voice and manner his extreme conscientiousness and the gloomy sense of responsibility under which he had arrived at his decision. "I cannot get out of my head," he continued, "Lord Dynmore's remark that, if the circumstances aroused suspicion in my mind, they could scarcely fail to apprise Mr. Lindo, who was more nearly concerned, of the truth, or something like the truth. Mind!" the curate added with a great show of candor, "I do not say, Mrs. Hammond, that Mr. Lindo knew. I only say I think he suspected."

"Well, that is very good of you!" Mrs. Hammond exclaimed, displaying a spirit and a power of sarcasm he had not expected. "I dare say Mr. Lindo will be much obliged to you for that! But, for my part, I think it is a distinction without a difference!"

"Oh, no!" the curate protested hastily.

"Well, I think it is, at any rate!" retorted the lady, very red in the face, and with all the bugles in her bonnet shaking. "However, everyone to his opinion. But that is not mine, and I am sorry it is yours. Why, you are his curate!" she added in a tone of indignant wonder, which brought the blood to Clode's cheeks, and made him bite his lip in impotent anger. "You ought to be the last person to doubt him!"

"Can I help it if I do?" he answered sullenly.

"Mother," said Laura quickly, intercepting the angry reply which was on Mrs. Hammond's lips, "if Mr. Clode thinks in that way, can he be blamed for telling us? We are not the town. What he has told us he has told us in confidence."

"A confidence Mrs. Hammond has made me bitterly regret," he rejoined, taking skilful advantage of her intervention.

Mrs. Hammond grunted. She was still angry, but she felt herself baffled. "Well, I do not understand these things, perhaps," she said. "But I do not agree with Mr. Clode, and I am not going to pretend to."

"I am sure he does not wish you to," said Laura sweetly. "Only you did not quite understand, I think, that he was only giving us his private opinion. Of course he would not tell it to the town."

"Well, that makes a difference, of course," Mrs. Hammond allowed. "But now, however, I will say good-morning! I shall go straight to the rectory now and inquire. Are you coming, Laura?"

Laura thought it better to go and with a bright little nod, tripped off after her mother. Mr. Clode, thus deserted, walked slowly down the drive, wondering whether he had been premature in his revolt. He did not think so; and yet he wished he had not been so hasty--that he had not shown his hand quite so early. The truth was, he had been a little carried away by the events of the previous afternoon. But, even now, the more he thought of it, the more hopeless seemed the rector's position. Openly denounced by his patron as an impostor, at war with his church-warden, disliked by a powerful section of the parish, one action already commenced against him and another threatened--what else could he do but resign? "He may say he will not to-day and to-morrow," the curate thought, smiling darkly to himself, "but they will be too much for him the day after."

And whether Mr. Clode told this opinion of his in the own or not, it was certainly a very common one. Never had Claversham been treated to such a dish of gossip as this. On the evening of the bazaar, before the unsold goods had been cleared from the tables, the wildest rumors were already afloat in the town. The rector had been arrested; he had decamped; he was to be tried for fraud; he was not in holy orders at all; Mrs. Bedford would have to be married over again! With the morning these reports died away, and something like the truth came to be known--to the inexpressible satisfaction of Dr. Gregg and his like. The doctor was in and out of half the houses in the town that day. "Resign!" he would say with a shriek--"of course he will resign! And glad to escape so easily!" Dr. Gregg, indeed, was in his glory now. The parts were reversed. It was for him now to meet the rector with a patronizing nod; only, for some reason best known to himself, and perhaps connected with an essential distinction between the two men, he preferred to celebrate his triumph figuratively, and behind Lindo's back.

What was said, and how it was said, can well be imagined. When a man who for some cause has held his head a little above his neighbors stumbles and falls, we know what is likely to be said of him. And the young rector knew, and in his heart and in his study suffered horribly. All the afternoon of the day after the bazaar he walked the town with a smile on his face, ostensibly visiting in his district, really vindicating his pride and courage. He carried his head as high as ever, and the skirts of his long black coat fluttered as bravely as before. Dr. Gregg, who saw him from the reading-room window, gave it as his opinion that he did not know what shame meant. But at heart the young man was unutterably miserable. He knew that inquisitive eyes were upon his every gesture; that he was watched, jeered at, worst of all--pitied. He guessed, as the day wore on, drawing the inference from the curate's avoidance of him, that even Clode had deserted him; and this, perhaps, almost as much as the resentment he harbored against Lord Dynmore, hardened him in his resolve not to resign or abate one tittle of his rights.

He fancied he stood alone. But, of course, there were some who sympathized with him, and some who held their tongues and declined to commit themselves to any opinion. Among the latter Mr. Bonamy was conspicuous--to the intense disgust of Dr. Gregg, whose first expression, indeed, on hearing the news had been, "What nuts for Bonamy!" As a fact, however, the snappish little doctor had never found his friend so morose and unpleasant as when he tried to sound him on this subject. He espied him on the other side of the street, and rushed across, stuttering almost before he reached him, "Well? He will have to resign, won't he?"

"Who?" said Mr. Bonamy, standing still, and fixing his cold gray eyes on the excited little man. "Who will have to resign?"

"Why, the rector, to be sure!" rejoined Gregg, feeling the check unpleasantly.

"Will he?"

"Well, I should say so," urged the doctor, now quite taken aback, and gazing at the other with eyes of surprise. "But I suppose you know best, Bonamy."

"Then I am going to keep my knowledge to myself!" snarled the lawyer; and, rattling a handful of silver in his pocket, he stalked away, his hat on the back of his head, and his lank figure more ungainly than usual. He was in the worst of tempers; angry with Lord Dynmore and dissatisfied with himself--given to calling himself, half a dozen times in an hour, a quixotic fool for having thrown away the earl's business for the sake of a scruple that was little more than a whim. It is all very well to have a queer rugged code of honor of one's own, and to observe it; but when the observance sends away business--such business as brings with it the social considerations which men prize most highly when they most affect to despise it--why then a man is apt to take out his self-denial in ill-temper. Mr. Bonamy did so.

Dr. Gregg went away calling the lawyer a bear and an ill-bred fellow who did not know his own friends. Alas! the same thing might have been said, and with greater justice, of the rector. The archdeacon sat an hour in his study, waiting patiently for him to return from his district, and after all got but a sorry reception. The elder man expressed, and expressed very warmly--he had come to do so--his full belief in Lindo's honesty and good faith, and was greatly touched by the effect his words produced upon the young fellow, who had come into the room, after learning his visitor's presence, with set lips and eyes of challenge, but had by-and-by to turn his back on his friend and look out of the window, while in a very low tone he murmured his thanks. But, alas! the archdeacon went farther, and let drop something about concession, and then the boat was over!

"Concession!" said the young man, turning as on a pivot, with every hair of his whiskers bristling, and his voice clear enough now. "What kind of concession do you mean?"

"Well," said the archdeacon persuasively, "the earl is a choleric man--a most passionate man, I know; and, when excited, utterly foolish and wrong-headed. But in his cooler moments I do not know any one more just or, indeed, more generous. And I feel sure that if you could prevail on yourself to meet him half-way----"

"By resigning?" snapped the rector, interrupting him point-blank with the question.

"Oh, no, no," said the archdeacon, "I do not mean that."

"Then in what way? How?"

But as the archdeacon really meant by resigning, he could not answer the question, and the interview ended in Lindo roundly declaring, as he walked up and down the room, "I will not resign! Understand that, archdeacon! I will not resign! If Lord Dynmore can put me out, well and good--let him. If not, I stay. He may be just or generous," continued the young man scornfully--"all I know is that he insulted me grossly, and as no gentleman would have insulted another."

"He is passionate, and was taken by surprise," the archdeacon ventured to say. But Lindo would not listen; and his visitor had presently to go, fearing that he had done more harm than good by his mediation. As for the rector, he was severely scolded later in the evening by Jack Smith for having omitted to lay the letters offering him the living before the archdeacon, or to explain to him the precise circumstances under which he had accepted it.

"But he said he did not doubt me," the rector urged rather fractiously.

"Pooh! that is not the point," the barrister retorted. "Of course he does not. He knows you. But I want to put him in possession of such a case as he may lay before others who do not know you. Look here, you are acquainted with a man called Felton, are you not?"

"Yes," Lindo answered, with a slight start.

"Well, perhaps you are not aware that he has been to Lord Dynmore--so the tale runs in the town, and I know it is true--and stated that you have been for weeks bribing him to keep the secret."

The rector sat motionless, staring at his friend. "I did not know it," he said at last, quite quietly. He was becoming accustomed to surprises of this kind. "It is a wicked lie, of course."

"Of course," Jack assented tossing one leg easily over the other, and thrusting his hands deep into his trousers' pockets. "But what do you say to it?"

"The man came to me," Lindo answered steadily, "and told me that he was Lord Dynmore's servant, and that, crossing from America, he had foolishly lost his money at play. He begged me to assist him until Lord Dynmore's return, and I did so. Some ten days ago I discovered that he was leading a disreputable life, and I stopped the allowance."

"Thanks," said Jack, nodding his head. "That is precisely what I thought. But the mischief of it is, you see, that the man's tale may be true in his eyes. He may have believed that he was blackmailing you. And therefore, since we cannot absolutely refute his story, it is the more important that we should show as good a case as possible aliunde. Nor does it make any difference," Jack continued drily, "that the man, after seeing Lord Dynmore last night, has taken himself quietly off this morning."

"What! Felton?" the rector exclaimed, coming suddenly upright.

"Yes. There is no doubt he has absconded. Bonamy's clerk has been after him all day, and has discovered that he begged half-a-crown from your curate, to whom he was seen speaking at the Top of the Town about ten this morning. Since that time he has not been seen."

"He may turn up yet," said the rector.

"I do not think he will," the barrister replied, with a shrewd gleam in his eyes. "But you must not flatter yourself that his disappearance will do you any good. Of course some people will say that he was afraid to remain and support a false statement. But more, I fear, will lean to the opinion that he was got out of the way by some one--you, for instance."

"I see," said Lindo slowly, after a long pause. "Then it is the more imperative that I should not dream of resigning."

"I think so," said Jack.