wled. Those were his watchwords in his dealings
with his womenkind.

The Vicar was making a prodigious effort to maintain what seemed
to him his god-like serenity. He was unaware that he was trying to
control at one and the same time his temper and his temperament.

He was a man of middle height and squarish build, dark, pale-skinned
and blue-eyed like his daughter Gwendolen. The Vicar's body stretched
tight the seams of his black coat and kept up, at fifty-seven, a false
show of muscular energy. The Vicar's face had a subtle quality of
deception. The austere nose, the lean cheek-bones, the square-cut
moustache and close-clipped, pointed beard (black, slightly grizzled)
made it appear, at a little distance, the face of an ascetic. It
approached, and the blue of the eyes, and the black of their dilated
pupils, the stare of the nostrils and the half hidden lines of the red
mouth revealed its profound and secret sensuality.

The interior that contained him was no less deceptive. Its book-lined
walls advertised him as the scholarly recluse that he was not. He had
had an eye to this effect. He had placed in prominent positions
the books that he had inherited from his father, who had been a
schoolmaster. You were caught at the very door by the thick red line
of The Tudor Classics; by the eleven volumes of The Bekker's Plato,
with Notes, bound in Russia leather, side by side with Jowett's
Translations in cloth; by Sophocles and Dean Plumptre, the Odyssey
and Butcher and Lang; by AEschylus and Robert Browning. The Vicar had
carried the illusion of scholarship so far as to hide his Aristophanes
behind a little curtain, as if it contained for him an iniquitous
temptation. Of his own accord and with a deliberate intention to
deceive, he had added the Early Fathers, Tillotsen's _Sermons_ and
Farrar's _Life of Christ_.

On another shelf, rather less conspicuous, were some bound volumes
of _The Record_, with the novels of Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Marie
Corelli. On the ledge of his bureau _Blackwood's Magazine_, uncut, lay
ready to his hand. The _Spectator_, in process of skimming, was on his
knees. The _Standard_, fairly gutted, was on the floor. There was no
room for it anywhere else.

For the Vicar's study was much too small for him. Sitting there, in
an arm-chair and with his legs in the fender, he looked as if he had
taken flight before the awful invasion of his furniture. His bookcases
hemmed him in on three sides. His rol