love their strong, timid,
patient hearts were as yet capable of. Satisfied that they were
comfortable, for he found them busy with a large feed of oats and chaff
and Indian corn, he threw his arm over the back of his favorite, and
stood, leaning against her for minutes, half dreaming, half thinking. As
long as they were busy, their munching and grinding soothed him--held
him at least in quiescent mood; the moment it ceased, he seemed to
himself to wake up out of a dream. In that dream, however, he had been
more awake than any hour for long years, and had heard and seen many
things. He patted his mare lovingly, then, with a faint sense of
rebuked injustice, went into the horse's stall, and patted and stroked
him as he had never done before.

He went into the inn, and asked for a cup of tea. He would have had a
sleep on Mrs. Pinks's sofa, as was his custom in his study--little
study, alas, went on there!--but he had a call to make, and must rouse
himself, and that was partly why he had sought the inn. For Mrs.
Ramshorn's household was so well ordered that nothing was to be had out
of the usual routine. It was like an American country inn, where, if you
arrive after supper, you will most likely have to starve till next
morning. Her servants, in fact, were her masters, and she dared not go
into her own kitchen for a jug of hot water. Possibly it was her
dethronement in her own house that made her, with a futile clutching
after lost respect, so anxious to rule in the abbey church. As it was,
although John Bevis and she had known each other long, and in some poor
sense intimately, he would never in her house have dared ask for a cup
of tea except it were on the table. But here was the ease of his inn,
where the landlady herself was proud to get him what he wanted. She made
the tea from her own caddy; and when he had drunk three cups of it,
washed his red face, and re-tied his white neck-cloth, he set out to
make his call.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RECTORY DRAWING-ROOM.

The call was upon his curate. It was years since he had entered the
rectory. The people who last occupied it, he had scarcely known, and
even during its preparation for Wingfold he had not gone near the place.
Yet of that house had been his dream as he stood in his mare's stall,
and it was with a strange feeling he now approached it. Friends
generally took the pleasanter way to the garden door, opening on the
churchyard, but Mr. Bevis went round by the la