this afternoon.'
She talked as if nothing had gone wrong. Peterborough, criminal red,
attacked a jam-pot for a diversion. 'Such sweets are rare indeed on the
Continent,' he observed to my aunt Dorothy. 'Our homemade dainties are
matchless.'

'Private chaplain!' the squire growled again.

'It's you that preach this afternoon,' Janet said to Peterborough. 'Do
you give us an extempore sermon?'

'You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little
trimming to do.'

Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him.
'You'll give me five minutes before you're out of the house, please. D'
ye smoke on Sundays?'

'Not on Sundays, sir,' said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as
to signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of
Sunday smoking.

'See you don't set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain's
tricks. I spied you puffing behind one t' other day. There,' the squire
dispersed Peterborough's unnecessary air of abstruse recollection,
'don't look as though you were trying to hit on a pin's head in a bushel
of oats. Don't set my ricks on fire--that 's all.'

'Mr. Peterborough,' my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this
rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his
sitting-room.

'Oh, I thank you!' I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to
the squire's mercy.

Janet followed me out. 'It was my fault, Harry. You won't blame him, I
know. But will he fib? I don't think he's capable of it, and I'm sure
he can't run and double. Grandada will have him fast before a minute is
over.'

I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire's promise
that Peterborough should have his living,--so much it seemed possible to
save.

She flew back, and in Peterborough's momentary absence, did her work.
Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and
much archaic English. The squire's power of vituperation was notorious:
he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps
in cogency of epithet. Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing
that he had never heard such language,--never dreamed of it. And to find
himself the object of it!--and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously
defend himself! The pain to him was in the conscience,--which is, like
the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its
derangement. He had eased his conscience to every question rig