rs, he had noticed, were frequently
favourably disposed towards young girls as wives, and Mr. Hearty was
determined that he would be proud of his son-in-law, that is to say,
his son-in-law was to be a man of whom anyone might feel proud.

It would not behove a Christian such as Mr. Hearty to wish a
fellow-being dead; but he could not disguise from himself the fact
that our casualties on the Western Front were heavy, particularly
during the period of offensives. Since the occasion when Millie had
asserted her independence, and had declined to order her affections in
accordance with Mr. Hearty's wishes, there had been something of an
armed neutrality existing between father and daughter. In this she had
been supported, not only by Bindle and Mrs. Hearty, but, by a strange
freak of fate, to a certain extent, by Mrs. Bindle herself.

Mr. Hearty had never quite understood how it was that his
sister-in-law had turned against him. She had said nothing whatever as
to where her sympathies lay; but Mr. Hearty instinctively felt that
she had ranged herself on the side of the enemy.

But the fates were playing for Mr. Hearty.

When the Rev. Mr. Sopley, of the Alton Road Chapel, had decided to
retire on account of failing health, Lady Knob-Kerrick determined to
bring up from Barton Bridge, her country residence, the Rev. Andrew
MacFie. She had forgiven him his participation in the Temperance Fete
fiasco, accepting his explanation that he had been drugged by the
disciples of the devil, a view that would have been entirely endorsed
by Mrs. Bindle, had she known that Bindle was responsible for the
mixing of alcohol with the lemonade.

The Barton Bridge Temperance Fete fiasco had proved the greatest
sensation that the county had ever known. The mixing of crude alcohol
and distilled mead with the lemonade, whereby the participants in the
rustic fete had been intoxicated, thus causing it to develop into a
wild orgy of violence, resulting in assaults upon Lady Knob-Kerrick
and the police, had been a nine days' wonder. A number of arrests had
been made; but when the true facts came to the knowledge of the
police, the prisoners had been quietly released, and officially
nothing more was heard of the affair.

It was a long time before Lady Knob-Kerrick could be persuaded to see
in the Rev. Andrew MacFie, the minister of her chapel, an innocent
victim of a deep-laid plot. It was he who had seized the hose that
washed her out of her carri