nversations, and being in an amiable mood exerted herself to be all
things to all women. She talked "huntin'" and she talked bridge, she
asked advice concerning her garden, she listened sweetly to details of
May Meetings, and vouchsafed copious and entirely untrue descriptions of
an author at home; only with the Vicar's wife did she allow herself the
privilege of being natural, and saying what she really meant.

Mrs Evans was elderly and stout, parochial and intensely proper.
Grizel was young and unconventional to an extreme, yet beneath the
dissimilarity there existed a sympathy between the two women which both
divined, and both failed equally to understand.

Grizel knew that Mrs Evans's brain viewed her with suspicion, but she
was complacently aware that Mrs Evans's heart was not in sympathy with
her brain. Was it not exactly the same in her own case? Mentally she
had pronounced the Vicar's wife a parochial bore, the type of
middle-aged orthodox, prudish woman whom her soul abhorred, but, as a
matter of fact, she did not abhor her at all, for the eyes of the soul
saw down beneath the stiffness and the propriety, and recognised a
connecting link.

"If I were in trouble, I'd like to put my head down on her nice broad
shoulder, and,--she'd like to have me there!"

"Well!" cried Grizel, sinking down in a soft little swirl of lace and
silver by the side of the chair which held the portly black satin form,
and resting one little hand on its arm with a gesture of half-caressing
intimacy. "Well! Are the Mothers still meeting?"

Mrs Evans preened herself, and did her honest best to look distressed.

"My dear, I am afraid you _mean_ to be naughty!"

Grizel nodded cheerily.

"I do... Aren't you glad? It's no use pretending to be shocked. You
have a whole parish-full of proper people who do what they ought, and
say what they should, and I come in as a refreshing change. Besides, I
really mean quite well! Who knows,--after half a dozen years of Chumley
influence, I may be as douce and staid as any one of them!"

At this point the obvious thing for Mrs Evans to do was plainly to
express a hope such might be the case; she knew it, and opened her mouth
to utter the aspiration, but as she did so she inclined her head to look
down into the dimpling radiance of the bride's face, and once again her
heart softened, and she felt that mysterious pricking at the back of her
eyes.

"My dear," she said gently, "I--I think