derstand an organ?" he asked quickly.

"Alas! I do not play," the stranger said, bringing his mind back with a
jerk for the answer, "and understand little about the instrument."

"Well, next time you are here come up into the loft, and I will show you
what a chest of rattletraps I have to work with. We are lucky to get
through a service without a breakdown; the pedal-board is too short and
past its work, and now the bellows are worn-out."

"Surely you can get that altered," the stranger said; "the bellows
shouldn't cost so much to mend."

"They are patched already past mending. Those who would like to pay for
new ones haven't got the money, and those who have the money won't pay.
Why, that very stall you sat in belongs to a man who could give us new
bellows, and a new organ, and a new church, if we wanted it. Blandamer,
that's his name--Lord Blandamer. If you had looked, you could have seen
his great coat of arms on the back of the seat; and he won't spend a
halfpenny to keep the roofs from falling on our heads."

"Ah," said the stranger, "it seems a very sad case." They had reached
the north door, and, as they stepped out, he repeated meditatively: "It
seems a very sad case; you must tell me more about it next time we
meet."

The organist took the hint, and wished his companion good-afternoon,
turning down towards the wharves for a constitutional on the riverside.
The stranger raised his hat with something of foreign courtesy, and
walked back into the town.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Miss Euphemia Joliffe devoted Saturday afternoons to Saint Sepulchre's
Dorcas Society. The meetings were held in a class-room of the Girls'
National School, and there a band of devoted females gathered week by
week to make garments for the poor. If there was in Cullerne some
threadbare gentility, and a great deal of middle-class struggling, there
was happily little actual poverty, as it is understood in great towns.
Thus the poor, to whom the clothes made by the Dorcas Society were
ultimately distributed, could sometimes afford to look the gift-horse in
the mouth, and to lament that good material had been marred in the
making. "They wept," the organist said, "when they showed the coats and
garments that Dorcas made, because they were so badly cut;" but this was
a libel, for there were many excellent needlewomen in the society, and
among the very best was Miss Euphemia Joliffe.

She was a staunch supporter of the church, and, h