Madge about
twenty minutes ago. She seemed very happy about something or other.'

'Mr. Jacomb,' said Nan, 'do you know the lady who left a minute ago?'

'No,' said he, wondering a little at the earnestness--or rather the
absentness--of her manner. 'I only caught a glimpse of her. She
belongs to one of the visiting sisterhoods.'

Nan was silent for a second or two.

'You came to the wedding, of course?' continued Mr. Jacomb, cheerfully.
'A capital match, that, for young De la Poer. She will have 18,000
pounds a year when her mother dies; and she is pretty too. She puts a
little side on, perhaps, when she's talking to strangers; but that's
nothing. His brother was at Oxford when I was there, I remember--an
awfully fast fellow; but they say all the sons of clergymen are; the
other swing of the pendulum, you know. There's a medium in all things;
and if one generation gives itself over too much to piety, the next goes
as far the other way. I suppose it's human nature.'

This air of agreeable levity--this odour of worldliness (which was in
great measure assumed)--did not seem to accord well with Nan's present
mood. She was disturbed--uncertain--yearning for something she knew not
what--and the echoes of that strange cry in the music were still in her
soul. Mr. Jacomb's airs of being a man of the world--of being a
clergyman who scorned to attach any esoteric mystery to his cloth, or to
expect to be treated with a particular reverence--might put him on easy
terms of friendship with Nan's sisters; but they only made Nan
regretful, and sometimes even impatient. Did he imagine the assumption
of flippancy made him appear younger than he really was? In any case it
was bad policy so far as Nan was concerned. Nan was a born worshipper.
She was bound to believe in something or somebody. And the story she
had heard of the Rev. Charles Jacomb's assiduous, earnest, uncomplaining
labour in that big parish had at the very outset won for him her great
regard. He did not understand how he was destroying her childlike faith
in him by his saturnine little jokes.

'Mr. Jacomb,' said Nan, timidly, 'I should be so greatly obliged to you
if you could find out something more for me about those sisterhoods.
They must do a great deal of good. And their dress is such a
protection; they can go anywhere without fear of rudeness or insult. I
suppose it is not a difficult thing to get admission----'

He was staring at her in amazeme