op it."

She poured out Gregory's tea, followed Bee and Cecil Tharp into the
conservatory, and left the two men together:

CHAPTER II

CONTINUED INFLUENCE OF THE REVEREND HUSSELL BARTER

To understand and sympathise with the feelings and action of the Rector
of Worsted Skeynes, one must consider his origin and the circumstances
of his life.

The second son of an old Suffolk family, he had followed the routine of
his house, and having passed at Oxford through certain examinations, had
been certificated at the age of twenty-four as a man fitted to impart
to persons of both sexes rules of life and conduct after which they had
been groping for twice or thrice that number of years. His character,
never at any time undecided, was by this fortunate circumstance
crystallised and rendered immune from the necessity for self-search
and spiritual struggle incidental to his neighbours. Since he was a
man neither below nor above the average, it did not occur to him to
criticise or place himself in opposition to a system which had gone on
so long and was about to do him so much good. Like all average men, he
was a believer in authority, and none the less because authority placed
a large portion of itself in his hands. It would, indeed, have been
unwarrantable to expect a man of his birth, breeding, and education to
question the machine of which he was himself a wheel.

He had dropped, therefore, at the age of twenty-six, insensibly, on the
death of an uncle, into the family living at Worsted Skeynes. He had
been there ever since. It was a constant and natural grief to him that
on his death the living would go neither to his eldest nor his second
son, but to the second son of his elder brother, the Squire. At the age
of twenty-seven he had married Miss Rose Twining, the fifth daughter of
a Huntingdonshire parson, and in less than eighteen years begotten ten
children, and was expecting the eleventh, all healthy and hearty like
him self. A family group hung over the fireplace in the study, under the
framed and illuminated text, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," which
he had chosen as his motto in the first year of his cure, and never seen
any reason to change. In that family group Mr. Barter sat in the centre
with his dog between his legs; his wife stood behind him, and on both
sides the children spread out like the wings of a fan or butterfly. The
bills of their schooling were beginning to weigh rather heavily, and he
com