us bodies who did not view Christianity
through the convex glasses of his own mental _pince-nez_. "In these days
we see too much of that. I leave that to the Broad Church, who want to
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I, on the contrary--"

But Hester had vanished.

There was a dangerous glint in her gray eyes, as she ran up to her
little attic.

"According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist," she
said to herself. "If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so.
For once I got out of the room in time."

Hester's attic was blisteringly hot. It was over the kitchen, and
through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly
wedded to boiled cabbage. Hester had learned during the last six months
all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering,
of which the preparation of food--and, still worse, the preparation of
chicken food--is capable. She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled
out of the house.

She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large
white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender
stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the
old gardener, Abel, was planting something large in the way of "runners"
or "suckers," making a separate hole for each with his thumb.

Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double
over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of
seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as "curly
kebbidge" or "salary" or "sparrow-grass."

Abel had his back towards Hester, and only the corduroy half of him was
visible as he stooped over his work. Occasionally he could be induced to
straighten himself, and--holding himself strongly at the hinge with
earth-ingrained hands--to discourse on polities and religion, and to
opine that our policy in China was "neither my eye nor my elber." "The
little lady," as he called Hester, had a knack of drawing out Abel; but
to-day, as he did not see her, she slipped past him, and, crossing the
church-yard, sat down for a moment in the porch to regain her breath,
under the card of printed texts offered for the consideration of his
flock by their young pastor.

"How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God,"
was the culling from the Scriptures which headed the selection.[A]
Hester knew that card well, though she never by any chan