out what he has. This, I may
say, he has done most effectually.

I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully,

Henry Lidderdale.

To which Mr. Ogilvie replied:

The Vicarage,

Meade Cantorum,

Bucks.

Jan. 16.

Dear Mr. Lidderdale,

I accept full responsibility for Mark and for Mark's money. Send
both of them along whenever you like. I'm not going to embark on
another controversy about the "rights" of boys. I've exhausted
every argument on this subject since Mark involved me in his
drastic measures of a month ago. But please let me assure you that
I will do my best for him and that I am convinced he will do his
best for me.

Yours truly,

Stephen Ogilvie.

CHAPTER XIII

WYCH-ON-THE-WOLD

Mark rarely visited his uncle and aunt after he went to live at Meade
Cantorum; and the break was made complete soon afterward when the living
of Wych-on-the-Wold was accepted by Mr. Ogilvie, so complete indeed that
he never saw his relations again. Uncle Henry died five years later;
Aunt Helen went to live at St. Leonard's, where she took up palmistry
and became indispensable to the success of charitable bazaars in East
Sussex.

Wych, a large village on a spur of the Cotswold hills, was actually in
Oxfordshire, although by so bare a margin that all the windows looked
down into Gloucestershire, except those in the Rectory; they looked out
across a flat country of elms and willow-bordered streams to a flashing
spire in Northamptonshire reputed to be fifty miles away. It was a high
windy place, seeming higher and windier on account of the numbers of
pigeons that were always circling round the church tower. There was
hardly a house in Wych that did not have its pigeon-cote, from the great
round columbary in the Rectory garden to the few holes in a gable-end of
some steep-roofed cottage. Wych was architecturally as perfect as most
Cotswold villages, and if it lacked the variety of Wychford in the vale
below, that was because the exposed position had kept its successive
builders too intent on solidity to indulge their fancy. The result was
an austere uniformity of design that accorded fittingly with a landscape
whose beauty was all of line and whose colour like the lichen on an old
wall did not flauntingly reveal its gradations of tint to the transient
observer. The bleak upland airs had taught the builders to be sparing
with their wi