om the amber; for Mrs Bulteel--the
brewer's lady--who wore London dresses, and was much the most
fashionable person in Cullerne, proposed that some edifying book should
be read aloud on Dorcas afternoons to the assembled workers. It was
true that Mrs Flint said she only did so because she thought she had a
fine voice; but however that might be, she proposed it, and no one cared
to run counter to her. So Mrs Bulteel read properly religious stories,
of so touching a nature that an afternoon seldom passed without her
being herself dissolved in tears, and evoking sympathetic sniffs and
sobs from such as wished to stand in her good books. If Miss Joliffe
was not herself so easily moved by imaginary sorrow, she set it down to
some lack of loving-kindness in her own disposition, and mentally
congratulated the others on their superior sensitiveness.

Miss Joliffe was at the Dorcas meeting, Mr Sharnall was walking by the
riverside, Mr Westray was with the masons on the roof of the transept;
only Anastasia Joliffe was at Bellevue Lodge when the front-door-bell
rang. When her aunt was at home, Anastasia was not allowed to "wait on
the gentlemen," nor to answer the bell; but her aunt being absent, and
there being no one else in the house, she duly opened one leaf of the
great front-door, and found a gentleman standing on the semicircular
flight of steps outside. That he was a gentleman she knew at a glance,
for she had a _flair_ for such useless distinctions, though the genus
was not sufficiently common at Cullerne to allow her much practice in
its identification near home. It was, in fact, the stranger of the
tenor voice, and such is the quickness of woman's wit, that she learnt
in a moment as much concerning his outward appearance as the organist
and the choir-men and the clerk had learnt in an hour; and more besides,
for she saw that he was well dressed. There was about him a complete
absence of personal adornment. He wore no rings and no scarf-pin, even
his watch-chain was only of leather. His clothes were of so dark a grey
as to be almost black, but Miss Anastasia Joliffe knew that the cloth
was good, and the cut of the best. She had thrust a pencil into the
pages of "Northanger Abbey" to keep the place while she answered the
bell, and as the stranger stood before her, it seemed to her he might be
a Henry Tilney, and she was prepared, like a Catherine Morland, for some
momentous announcement when he opened his lips.