u instead
of you converting the savages. I'm sure I beg your pardon. And have
you ever set fire to a bishop?"

"Austin! Austin!" came still more faintly from Aunt Charlotte.

The vicar, scandalised at first, was now in convulsions of silent
laughter. Mrs Sheepshanks's parasol was lowered in a most suspicious
manner, so as completely to hide her face; while the unfortunate
curate, with his head almost between his knees, was working havoc in
the vicarage lawn with the point of a heavy walking-stick. The only
person who seemed perfectly at his ease was Austin, and he was
enjoying himself hugely. Then the vicar, feeling it incumbent upon
him, as host, to say something to relieve the strain, attempted to
pull himself together.

"My dear boy," he said, in rather a quavering voice, "you may be
perfectly sure that our valued guest has no sympathy with any of the
barbarous religions you allude to, but is a most loyal member of the
Church of England; and that when he said he would like to 'burn' a
brother clergyman--one of the greatest Talmudists and Hebrew scholars
now alive--it was only his humorous way of intimating that he was
inclined to differ from him on one or two obscure points of historical
or verbal criticism which----"

"It was not," said the curate's friend.

Mrs Sheepshanks immediately turned to Aunt Charlotte, and remarked
that feather boas were likely to be more than ever in fashion when the
weather changed; and Aunt Charlotte said she had heard from a most
authoritative source that pleated corselets were to be the rage that
autumn. Both ladies then agreed that the days were certainly beginning
to draw in, and asked the curate if he didn't think so too. The curate
fumbled in his pocket, and offered Austin a cigarette, and Austin,
noticing the unconcealed annoyance of the unfortunate young man, who
was really not a bad fellow in the main, felt kindly towards him, and
accepted the cigarette with effusion. The vicar relapsed into silence,
making no attempt to complete his unfinished sentence; then he stole a
glance at the saturnine face of the stranger, and from that moment
became an almost liberal-minded theologian; He had had an
object-lesson that was to last him all his life, and he never forgot
it.

"Well, Austin," said Aunt Charlotte, when they were walking home, a
few minutes later, "of course you _ought_ to have a severe scolding
for your behaviour this afternoon; but the fact is, my dear, that on
thi