the eyes of Mary Lowther. The mill is to
be repaired, though he knows he will never get any interest on the
outlay, because Mary Lowther has said that Bullhampton water-meads
would be destroyed if the mill were to tumble down. He has drawn for
himself mental pictures of Mary Lowther till he has invested her with
every charm and grace and virtue that can adorn a woman. In very
truth he believes her to be perfect. He is actually and absolutely in
love. Mary Lowther has hitherto neither accepted nor rejected him.
In a very few lines further on we will tell how the matter stands
between them.

It has already been told that the Rev. Frank Fenwick is Vicar of
Bullhampton. Perhaps he was somewhat guided in his taking of the
living by the fact that Harry Gilmore, the squire of the parish,
had been his very intimate friend at Oxford. Fenwick, at the period
with which we are about to begin our story, had been six years at
Bullhampton, and had been married about five and a half. Of him
something has already been said, and perhaps it may be only necessary
further to state that he is a tall, fair-haired man, already becoming
somewhat bald on the top of his head, with bright eyes, and the
slightest possible amount of whiskers, and a look about his nose and
mouth which seems to imply that he could be severe if he were not so
thoroughly good-humoured. He has more of breeding in his appearance
than his friend,--a show of higher blood; though whence comes such
show, and how one discerns that appearance, few of us can tell. He
was a man who read more and thought more than Harry Gilmore, though
given much to athletics and very fond of field sports. It shall
only further be said of Frank Fenwick that he esteemed both his
churchwardens and his bishop, and was afraid of neither.

His wife had been a Miss Balfour, from Loring, in Gloucestershire,
and had had some considerable fortune. She was now the mother of
four children, and, as Fenwick used to say, might have fourteen for
anything he knew. But as he also had possessed some small means
of his own, there was no poverty, or prospect of poverty at the
vicarage, and the babies were made welcome as they came. Mrs. Fenwick
is as good a specimen of an English country parson's wife as you
shall meet in a county,--gay, good-looking, fond of the society
around her, with a little dash of fun, knowing in blankets and
corduroys and coals and tea; knowing also as to beer and gin and
tobacco; acquaint