er
days--you must remember that all that is unknown to me. Won't you
exercise your powers of analysis for my benefit?"

"You are very kind," said the Vicar in high delight; "let me see, let
me see! Well, dear Maud as a girl had always a very high and anxious
sense of responsibility and duty. She conceived of herself--perhaps
owing to some chance expressions of my own--as bound as far as possible
to fill the place of her dear mother--a gap, of course, that it was
impossible to fill,--my own pursuits are, you will realise, mere
distractions, or, to be frank, were originally so designed, to combat
my sense of loss. But I am personally not a man who makes a morbid
demand for sympathy--I have little use for sympathy. I face my troubles
alone; I suffer alone," said the Vicar with an incredible relish. "And
then Jack is an independent boy, and has no taste for being dominated.
So that I fear that dear Maud's most touching efforts hardly fell on
very responsive soil. She felt, I think, the failure of her efforts;
and kind as Cousin Anne is, there is, I think, a certain vagueness of
outline about her mind. I would not call her a fatalist, but she has
little conception of the possibility of moulding character;--it's a
rich mind, but perhaps an indecisive mind? Maud needed a vocation--she
needed an aim. And then, too, you have perhaps observed--or possibly,"
said the Vicar gleefully, "she has effaced that characteristic out of
deference to your own great power of amiable toleration--but she had a
certain incisiveness of speech which had some power to wound? I will
give you a small instance. Gibbs, the schoolmaster, is a very worthy
man, but he has a certain flightiness of manner and disposition. Dear
Maud, talking about him one day at our luncheon-table, said that one
read in books how some people had to struggle with some underlying
beast in their constitution, the voracious man, let us say, with the
pig-like element, the cruel man with the tiger-like quality. 'Mr.
Gibbs,' she said, 'seems to me to be struggling not with a beast, but
with a bird.' She went on very amusingly to say that he reminded her of
a wagtail, tripping along with very short steps, and only saved by
adroitness from overbalancing. It was a clever description of poor
Gibbs--but I felt it somehow to be indiscreet. Well, you know, poor
Gibbs came to me a few days later--you realise how gossip spreads in
these places--and said that he was hurt in his mind to think