l-top desk, advancing on him
from the window, had driven and squeezed him into the arm-chair. His
bureau, armed to the teeth, leaning from its ambush in the recess of
the fireplace, threatened both the retreat and the left flank movement
of the chair. The Vicar was neither tall nor powerful, but his study
made him look like a giant imprisoned in a cell.

The room was full of the smell of tobacco, of a smoldering coal fire,
of old warm leather and damp walls, and of the heavy, virile odor of
the Vicar.

A brown felt carpet and thick serge curtains shut out the draft of the
northeast window.

On a September evening the Vicar was snug enough in his cell; and
before the Grande Polonaise had burst in upon him he had been at peace
with God and man.

* * * * *

But when he heard those first exultant, challenging bars he scowled
inimically.

Not that he acknowledged them as a challenge. He was inclined rather
to the manly course of ignoring the Grande Polonaise altogether. And
not for a moment would he have admitted that there had been anything
in his behavior that could be challenged or defied, least of all by
his daughter Alice. To himself in his study Mr. Cartaret appeared
as the image of righteousness established in an impregnable place.
Whereas his daughter Alice was not at all in a position to challenge
and defy.

She had made a fool of herself.

She knew it; he knew it; everybody knew it in the parish they had left
five months ago. It had been the talk of the little southern seaside
town. He thanked God that nobody knew it, or was ever likely to know
it, here.

For Alice's folly was not any ordinary folly. It was the kind that
made the parish which was so aware of it uninhabitable to a sensitive
vicar.

He reflected that she would be clever if she made a fool of herself
here. By his decisive action in removing her from that southern
seaside town he had saved her from continuing her work. In order to do
it he had ruined his prospects. He had thrown up a good living for a
poor one; a living that might (but for Alice it certainly would) have
led to preferment for a living that could lead to nothing at all; a
living where he could make himself felt for a living where there was
nobody to feel him.

And, having done it, he was profoundly sorry for himself.

So far as Mr. Cartaret could see there had been nothing else to do. If
it had all to be done over again, he told himself th