th this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little maid whom
Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study for the evening's
festivities, put his last sermon into the waste-paper basket. His wife
looked after him with eyes that spoke unutterable things.

'You would never think,' she said in an agitated voice to Young Elsmere,
'that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to every invitation, that
he entirely agreed with me that one _must_ be civil to Mrs. Seaton,
considering that she can make anybody's life a burden to them about here
that isn't; but it's no use.'

And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her face full
of a half-tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere restrained a
strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead to distract and
console her. He expressed sympathy with her difficulties, he talked
to her about her party, he got from her the names and histories of the
guests. How Miss Austenish it sounded; the managing rector's wife, her
still more managing old maid of a sister, the neighboring clergyman
who played the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just
out--'Very pretty' sighed 'Mrs. Thornburgh, who was now depressed all
round, 'but all flounces and frills and nothing to say'--and last of
all those three sisters, the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a different
level, and whom he had heard mentioned so often since his arrival by
both husband and wife.

'Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,' he said presently. 'You and cousin
William seem to have a great affection for them. Do they live near?'

'Oh, quite close,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh brightening at last, and like
a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the more ardently to
take up another. 'There is the house,' and she pointed out Burwood among
its trees. Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon him she fell into a
more or less incoherent account of her favorites. She laid on hot colors
thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.

'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!' he said
laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here--a widow and
three daughters--from the south? It was an odd settlement surely, though
you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in England.'

'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think it
very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a
carrier that gets drunk, too! Why you know