company."

"Well, let me know the first evening you want to practise," Westray
said, "and I will come, too, and sit in the loft. Take care of
yourself, and you will soon grow out of all these fancies, and laugh at
them as much as I do." And he feigned a smile. But it was late at
night; he was high-strung and nervous himself, and the fact that Mr
Sharnall should have been brought to such a pitiable state of mental
instability depressed him.

The report that the Bishop was going to lunch with Mr Sharnall on the
day of the Confirmation soon spread in Cullerne. Miss Joliffe had told
Mr Joliffe the pork-butcher, as her cousin, and Mr Joliffe, as
churchwarden, had told Canon Parkyn. It was the second time within a
few weeks that a piece of important news had reached the Rector at
second-hand. But on this occasion he experienced little of the chagrin
that had possessed him when Lord Blandamer made the great offer to the
restoration fund through Westray. He did not feel resentment against
Mr Sharnall; the affair was of too solemn an importance for any such
personal and petty sentiments to find a place. Any act of any Bishop
was vicariously an act of God, and to chafe at this dispensation would
have been as out of place as to be incensed at a shipwreck or an
earthquake. The fact of being selected as the entertainer of the Bishop
of Carisbury invested Mr Sharnall in the Rector's eyes with a
distinction which could not have been possibly attained by mere
intellect or technical skill or devoted drudgery. The organist became
_ipso facto_ a person to be taken into account.

The Rectory had divined and discussed, and discussed and divined, how it
was, could, would, should, have been that the Bishop could be lunching
with Mr Sharnall. Could it be that the Bishop had thought that Mr
Sharnall kept an eating-house, or that the Bishop took some special diet
which only Mr Sharnall knew how to prepare? Could it be that the
Bishop had some idea of making Mr Sharnall organist in his private
chapel, for there was no vacancy in the Cathedral? Conjecture charged
the blank wall of mystery full tilt, and retired broken from the
assault. After talking of nothing else for many hours, Mrs Parkyn
declared that the matter had no interest at all for her.

"For my part, I cannot profess to understand such goings-on," she said
in that convincing and convicting tone which implies that the speaker
knows far more than he cares to state, an