an attempt.

She had looked on him with favor for several months--with especial
favor for three months, for three months had just passed since she had
promised to marry him, believing that to be the wife of a clergyman
who, though still young, had two curates to do the rough work for
him--clerical charwomen, so to speak--would make her the happiest of
womankind. Mr. Holland was rector of St. Chad's, Battenberg Square, and
he was thought very highly of even by his own curates, who intoned all
the commonplace, everyday prayers in the liturgy for him, leaving him
to do all the high-class ones, and to repeat the Commandments. (A
rector cannot be expected to do journeyman's work, as it were; and it
is understood that a bishop will only be asked to intone three short
prayers, those from behind a barrier, too; an archbishop refuses to do
more than pronounce the benediction.)

The Rev. George Holland was a good-looking man of perhaps a year or
two over thirty. He did not come of a very good family--a fact which
probably accounted for his cleverness at Oxford and in the world. He was
a Fellow of his college, though he had not been appointed rector of
St. Chad's for this reason. The appointment, as is well known (in the
Church, at any rate), is the gift of the Earl of Earlscourt, and it so
happened that, when at college together, George Holland had saved the
young man who a year or two afterward became Earl of Earlscourt from
a very great misfortune. The facts of the case were these: Tommy
Trebovoir, as he was then, had made up his mind to marry a lady whose
piquant style of beauty made the tobacconist's shop where she served the
most popular in town. By the exercise of a great deal of diplomacy and
the expenditure of a little money, Mr. Holland brought about a
match between her and quite another man--a man who was not even on
a subsidiary path to a peerage, and whose only connection with the
university was due to his hiring out horses to those whom he called the
"young gents." Tommy was so indignant with his friend for the part he
had played in this transaction he ceased to speak to him, and went the
length of openly insulting him. Six years afterward, when he had become
Earl of Earlscourt, and had espoused the daughter of a duke,--a lady who
was greatly interested in the advance of temperance,--he had presented
George Holland with the living at St. Chad's.

People then said that Lord Earlscourt was a lesser fool than some of