Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus sages.

— LA FONTAINE

IF, after the departure of the Pratts, Rachel had hoped for a word with Hester she was doomed to disappointment. Mr. Gresley took the seat on the sofa beside Rachel which Ada Pratt had vacated, and after a few kindly eulogistic remarks on the Bishop of Southminster and the responsibilities of wealth, he turned the conversation into the well-worn groove of Warpington.

Rachel proved an attentive listener, and after Mr. Gresley had furnished her at length with nutritious details respecting parochial work, he went on:

“I am holding this evening a temperance meeting in the Parish Room. I wish, Miss West, that I could persuade you to stay for it, and thus enlist your sympathies in a matter of vital importance.”

“They have been enlisted in it for the last ten years,” said Rachel, who was not yet accustomed to the invariable assumption on the part of Mr. Gresley that no one took an interest in the most obvious good work until he had introduced and championed it. “But,” she added, “I will stay with pleasure.”

Dick, who was becoming somewhat restive under Mrs. Gresley’s inquiries about the Newhavens, became suddenly interested in the temperance meeting.

“I’ve seen many a good fellow go to the dogs through drink in the Colonies, more’s the pity," Dick remarked. "I think I’ll come, too, James. And if you want a few plain words you call on me.”

“I will,” said Mr. Gresley, much gratified. “I always make a point of encouraging the laity, at least those among them who are thoroughly grounded in Church teaching, to express themselves. Hear both sides, that is what I always say. The Bishop constantly enjoins on his clergy to endeavour to elicit the lay opinion. The chair this evening will be taken by Mr. Pratt, a layman.”

The temperance meeting was to take place at seven o’clock, and possibly Rachel may have been biased in favour of that entertainment by the hope of a quiet half-hour with Hester in her own room. At any rate, she secured it.

When they were alone Rachel produced Lady Newhaven’s note.

“Do come to Westhope,” she said. “While you are under this roof it seems almost impossible to see you, unless we are close to it,” and she touched the sloping ceiling with her hand. “And yet I came to Westhope, and I am going on to Wilderleigh partly in order to be near you.”

Hester shook her head.

“The book is nearly finished,” she said, the low light from the attic window striking sideways on the small face with its tightly compressed lips.

A spirit indomitable, immortal, looked for a moment out of Hester’s grey eyes. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was becoming weaker day by day.

“When it is finished,” she went on, “I will go anywhere and do anything, but stay here I must till it is done. Besides, I am not fit for society at present. I am covered with blue mould. Do you remember how that horrid Lady Carbury used to laugh at the country squires’ daughters for being provincial? I have gone a peg lower than being provincial, I have become parochial.”

A knock came at the door, and Fraülein’s mild, musical face appeared in the aperture.

“I fear to disturb you,” she said, “but Regie say he cannot go to sleep till he see you.”

Hester introduced Fraülein to Rachel, and slipped downstairs to the night nursery.

Mary and Stella were already asleep in their high-barred cribs. The blind was down, and Hester could only just see the white figure of Regie sitting up in his nightgown. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took him in her arms.

“What is it, my treasure?”

“Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying halfpenny?”

“No, darling. Why?”

“Because mother always says not to put pennies in my mouth, and I never did till to-day. And now Mary says I have been very naughty.”

“It does not matter what Mary says,” said Hester, with a withering glance towards the sleeping angel in the next crib, who was only Mary by day. “But you must never do it again, and you will tell mother all about it to-morrow.”

“Yes,” said Regie; “but, but —”

“But what?”

“Uncle Dick did say it was a flying halfpenny, and you said so, too, and that other auntie. And I thought it did not matter putting in flying halfpennies, only common ones.”

Hester saw the difficulty in Regie’s mind. “It felt common when it was inside,” said Regie doubtfully, “and yet you and Uncle Dick did say it was a flying one.”

Regie’s large eyes were turned upon her with solemn inquiry in them. It is in crises like this that our first ideals are laid low.

Regie had always considered Hester as the very soul of honour, that mysterious honour which he was beginning to dimly apprehend through her allegiance to it, and which, in his mind, belonged as exclusively to her as the little bedroom under the roof.

“Regie,” said Hester, tremulously, seeing that she had unwittingly put a stumbling-block before the little white feet she loved, “when we played at the doll’s tea-party, and you were the butler, I did not mean you were really a butler, did I? I knew, and you know, and we all knew, that you were Regie all the time.”

“Ye-es.”

“It was a game. And so when Uncle Dick found us playing the tea-party game he played another game about the flying halfpenny.”

“Then it was a common halfpenny after all,” said Regie with a deep sigh.

“Yes, it was a common halfpenny, only the game was that it could fly, like the other game was that the acorn-cups were real tea-cups. So Uncle Dick and all of us were not saying what was not true. We were all playing at a game. Do you understand, my little mouse?”

“Yes,” said Regie, with another voluminous sigh, and Hester realised with thankfulness that the halfpenny and not herself had fallen from its pedestal. “I see now, but when he said, Hi! Presto! and it flew away, I thought I saw it flying. Mary said she did. And I suppose the gate was only a game too.”

Hester felt that the subject would be quite beyond her powers of explanation if once the gate were introduced into it.

She laid Regie down and covered him.

“And you will go to sleep now. And I will ask Uncle Dick when next he comes to show us how he did the game with the halfpenny.”

“Yes,” said Regie dejectedly. “I’d rather know what there is to be known. Only I thought it was a flying one. Good night, Auntie Hester.”

She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had arrived. Mr. Gresley’s voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.

Accordingly a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the parish room. It was crammed. The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure. Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say. Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington. Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.

Dick, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the assembly, and as Rachel well knew, looking for her. Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals. There was a vacant space between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible. Entirely disregarding the anxious churchwardens who were waving him forward Dick disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of space upon the empty seat near her, and Dick, who had persuaded the young men to give him footroom on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several “school forms,” sat down beside her.

It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling. But the thought darted through her mind that Dick was the kind of man who somehow or other would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry. There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished with a nervous tremor that his choice had fallen on some one else.

The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighbouring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker. Mr. Pratt’s face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long parti-coloured whiskers. He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his “humble brethren,” admirably suited to one, who after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a “county family.”

The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.

The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin ascetic looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties. Dick who had so far taken more interest in Rachel’s gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.

A restive movement in the audience followed the speech, which was loudly clapped by Mr. Gresley and the Pratts.

Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.

Mr. Gresley had an enormous advantage as a platform speaker, and as a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home, owing to the conviction that he had penetrated to the core of any subject under discussion, and could pronounce judgment upon it in a conclusive manner. He was wont to approach every subject by the preliminary statement that he had “threshed it out.” This threshing out had been so thorough that there was hardly a subject even of the knottiest description which he was unable to dismiss with a few pregnant words. “Evolution! Ha! ha!! Descended from an ape. I don’t believe that for one.” While women’s rights received their death-blow from a jocose allusion to the woman following the plough, while the man sat at home and rocked the cradle.

With the same noble simplicity he grappled with the difficult and complex subject of temperance, by which he meant total abstinence. He informed his hearers, “in the bigoted tones of a married teetotaler,” that he had gone to the root of the matter — the roots were apparently on the surface — and that it was no use calling black white and white black. He for one did not believe in muddling up black and white as some lukewarm people advocated till they were only a dirty grey. No; either drink was right or it was wrong. If it was not wrong to get drunk, he did not know what was wrong. He was not a man of compromise. Alcohol was a servant of the devil, and to tamper with it was to tamper with the evil one himself; touch not; taste not; handle not. He for his part should never side with the devil.

This lofty utterance having been given time to sink in, Mr. Gresley looked round at the sea of stolid, sullen faces, and concluded with saying that the chairman would now call upon his cousin, Mr. Vernon, to speak to them on the shocking evils he himself had witnessed in Australia as the results of drink.

Dick was not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from ............