and she felt also that if he ever did make such a declaration,
it might be that she should not receive it unkindly. She was still
angry with him, very angry with him; so angry that she would bite her
lip and stamp her foot as she thought of what he had said and done.
Nevertheless, she yearned to let him know that he was forgiven; all
that she required was that he should own that he had sinned.

She was to meet him at Ullathorne on the last day of the present
month. Miss Thorne had invited all the country round to a breakfast
on the lawn. There were to be tents, and archery, and dancing for
the ladies on the lawn and for the swains and girls in the paddock.
There were to be fiddlers and fifers, races for the boys, poles to
be climbed, ditches full of water to be jumped over, horse-collars
to be grinned through (this latter amusement was an addition of the
stewards, and not arranged by Miss Thorne in the original programme),
and every game to be played which, in a long course of reading, Miss
Thorne could ascertain to have been played in the good days of Queen
Elizabeth. Everything of more modern growth was to be tabooed, if
possible. On one subject Miss Thorne was very unhappy. She had been
turning in her mind the matter of a bull-ring, but could not succeed
in making anything of it. She would not for the world have done, or
allowed to be done, anything that was cruel; as to the promoting the
torture of a bull for the amusement of her young neighbours, it need
hardly be said that Miss Thorne would be the last to think of it.
And yet there was something so charming in the name. A bull-ring,
however, without a bull would only be a memento of the decadence of
the times, and she felt herself constrained to abandon the idea.
Quintains, however, she was determined to have, and had poles and
swivels and bags of flour prepared accordingly. She would no doubt
have been anxious for something small in the way of a tournament,
but, as she said to her brother, that had been tried, and the age had
proved itself too decidedly inferior to its forerunners to admit of
such a pastime. Mr. Thorne did not seem to participate much in her
regret, feeling perhaps that a full suit of chain-armour would have
added but little to his own personal comfort.

This party at Ullathorne had been planned in the first place as a
sort of welcoming to Mr. Arabin on his entrance into St. Ewold's
parsonage; an intended harvest-home gala for the labourers and