d to the church, or to
Christianity, or even to religious belief of any sort, his liking,
coupled with a vague sense of duty, had urged him to this most
unassuming attempt to cast the friendly arm of faith around the
unbeliever.

"I plead guilty to the former," answered Faber, "but somehow I have
never practiced the euthanasia. The instincts of my profession, I
suppose are against it. Besides, that ought to be your business."

"Not altogether," said the rector, with a kindly look from his box,
which, however, only fell on the top of the doctor's hat.

Faber seemed to feel the influence of it notwithstanding, for he
returned,

"If all clergymen were as liberal as you, Mr. Bevis, there would be more
danger of some of us giving in."

The word _liberal_ seemed to rouse the rector to the fact that his
coachman sat on the box, yet another conscience, beside him. _Sub divo_
one must not be _too_ liberal. There was a freedom that came out better
over a bottle of wine than over the backs of horses. With a word he
quickened the pace of his cleric steeds, and the doctor was dropped
parallel with the carriage window. There, catching sight of Mrs. Bevis,
of whose possible presence he had not thought once, he paid his
compliments, and made his apologies, then trotted his gaunt Ruber again
beside the wheel, and resumed talk, but not the same talk, with the
rector. For a few minutes it turned upon the state of this and that
ailing parishioner; for, while the rector left all the duties of public
service to his curate, he ministered to the ailing and poor upon and
immediately around his own little property, which was in that corner of
his parish furthest from the town; but ere long, as all talk was sure to
do between the parson and any body who owned but a donkey, it veered
round in a certain direction.

"You don't seem to feed that horse of yours upon beans, Faber," he said.

"I don't seem, I grant," returned the doctor; "but you should see him
feed! He eats enough for two, but he _can't_ make fat: all goes to
muscle and pluck."

"Well, I must allow the less fat he has to carry the better, if you're
in the way of heaving him over such hedges on to the hard road. In my
best days I should never have faced a jump like that in cold blood,"
said the rector.

"I've got no little belongings of wife or child to make a prudent man of
me, you see," returned the surgeon. "At worst it's but a knock on the
head and a longish snooze."