Even the
mounds of the graveyard, interspersed amidst the old tombstones, looked
green and cheerful to-day in the golden light.

Turning slowly out of the Vicarage gate came a good-looking clergyman of
seven-or-eight-and-twenty. A slender man of middle height, with a sweet
expression on his pale, thoughtful face, and dark earnest eyes. It was
the new Vicar of Church Leet, the Reverend Robert Grame.

For a goodish many years have gone on since that tragedy of poor
Katherine's death, and this is the second appointed Vicar since that
inauspicious time.

Mr. Grame walked across the churchyard, glancing at the inscriptions on
the tombs. Inside the church porch stood the clerk, old John Cale, keys
in hand. Mr. Grame saw him and quickened his pace.

"Have I kept you waiting, Cale?" he cried in his pleasant, considerate
tones. "I am sorry for that."

"Not at all, your reverence; I came afore the time. This here church is
but a step or two off my home, yonder, and I'm as often out here as I be
indoors," continued John Cale, a fresh-coloured little man with pale
grey eyes and white hair. "I've been clerk here, sir, for
seven-and-thirty years."

"You've seen more than one parson out then, I reckon."

"More than one! Ay, sir, more than--more than six times one, I was going
to say; but that's too much, maybe. Let's see: there was Mr. Cartright,
he had held the living I hardly know how many years when I came, and he
held it for many after that. Mr. West succeeded him--the Reverend George
West; then came Thomas Dancox; then Mr. Atterley: four in all. And now
you've come, sir, to make the fifth."

"Did they all die? or take other livings?"

"Some the one thing, sir, and some the other. Mr. Cartright died, he was
old; and Mr. West, he--he--" John Cale hesitated before he went on--"he
died; Mr. Dancox got appointed to a chaplaincy somewhere over the seas;
he was here but about eighteen months, hardly that; and Mr. Atterley,
who has just left, has had a big church with a big income, they say,
given to him over in Oxfordshire."

"Which makes room for me," smiled Robert Grame.

They were inside the church now; a small and very old-fashioned church,
with high pews, dark and sombre. Over the large pew of the Monks,
standing sideways to the pulpit, sundry slabs were on the wall, their
inscriptions testifying to the virtues and ages of the Monk family dead
and gone. Mr. Grame stood to read them. One slab of white marble, its
black