left a hat pin with a silver swallow on the end of it in that first
hotel in Lisbon. Would you mind going in the next day you are passing
and asking for it? I hate to bother you and I wouldn't, only that we
don't any of us remember the name of the hotel and so can't write."

I rather shrank from asking that hotel keeper for a pin supposed to have
been dropped in one of his bedrooms during the previous August. But
Miss Battersby, at least, does not deserve to suffer. I spent a long
afternoon going round the jewellers' shops in Lisbon and in the end
secured a pin with two silver doves and a heart on it. I sent this
to Miss Battersby and explained that it was the nearest thing to her
original swallow which the hotel keeper had been able to find. She is,
fortunately, quite an easy person to please. She wrote thanking me for
the trouble I had taken.

CHAPTER IX

My friends were singularly successful in their negotiations on my
behalf. Not a single bishop proceeded with his libel action against
Lalage. Nor was I forced to buy any of them off by building even a small
cathedral. I attribute our escape from their vengeance entirely to the
Provost. His clear statement of the impossibility of obtaining damages
by any legal process must have had its effect.

Gossip too died away with remarkable suddenness. I heard afterward that
old Tollerton got rapidly worse and succumbed to his disease, whatever
it was, very shortly after his last interview with my uncle. I have
no doubt that his death had a good deal to do with the decay of public
interest in the _Anti-Tommy-Rot Gazette_. The Archdeacon, who also was
inclined to talk a good deal, had his mind distracted by other events.
The bishop of our diocese had a paralytic stroke. He was not one of
those whom Lalage libelled, so the blame for his misfortune cannot be
laid on us. The Archdeacon was, in consequence, very fully occupied in
the management of diocesan affairs and forgot all about the _Gazette_.
Canon Beresford ventured back to his parish after a stay of six weeks in
Wick. He would not have dared to return if there had been the slightest
chance of the Archdeacon's reverting to the painful subject in
conversation. Had there been even the slightest reference to it in the
newspapers, Canon Beresford, instead of returning home, would have gone
farther afield to an Orkney Island or the Shetland group, or, perhaps,
to one of those called Faroe, which do not appear on ordinar