e--you shouldn't
have been interrupted for a single instant--if Mrs. Venables wasn't
clamoring to see you. And really I begin to clamor too; for she is full
of some mysterious news, which she won't tell me till you are there to
hear it also. Be an angel, for five minutes!"

Woodgate wiped his pen in his deliberate way.

"Probably one of the girls is engaged," said he; "if so I hope it's
Sybil."

"No, Sybil is here too; she doesn't look a bit engaged, but rather
bored, as though she had heard the story several times already, whatever
it may be. They have certainly paid several calls. Now you look quite
nice, so in you come."

Mrs. Venables, a stout but comely lady, with a bright brown eye, and a
face full of character and ability, opened fire upon the vicar as soon
as they had shaken hands, while her daughter looked wistfully at the
nearest books.

"He is married!" cried Mrs. Venables, beginning in the middle like a
modern novelist.

"Indeed?" returned the matter-of-fact clergyman, with equal
directness--"and who is he?"

"Your neighbor and your patron--Mr. Steel!"

"Married?" repeated Mrs. Woodgate, with tremendous emphasis. "Mr.
Steel?"

"This is news!" declared her husband, as though he had expected none
worthy of the name. And they both demanded further particulars, at which
Mrs. Venables shook her expensive bonnet with great relish.

"Do you know Mr. Steel so well--so much better than we do--and can you
ask for particulars about anything he ever does? His marriage,"
continued Mrs. Venables, "like everything else about him, is 'wrop in
mystery,' as one of those vulgar creatures says in Dickens, but I really
forget which. It was never announced in the _Times_; for that I can
vouch myself. Was ever anything more like him, or less like anybody
else? To disappear for six months, and then turn up with a wife!"

"But has he turned up?" cried the vicar's young wife, forgetting for a
moment a certain preoccupation caused by the arrival of the tea-tray,
and by a rapid resignation to the thickness of the bread and butter and
the distressing absence of such hot things as would have been in
readiness if Mrs. Venables had been expected for a single moment. It
showed the youth of Morna Woodgate that she should harbor a wish to
compete with the wealthiest woman in the neighborhood, even in the
matter of afternoon tea, and her breeding that no such thought was
legible in her clear-cut open-air face.

"I have heard n