end of all further remonstrance from me,
as a matter of course.

Oscar walked off with his prisoner to the house. Jicks trotted along by
his side, unconscious of the mischief she had done, singing another verse
of the nursery song. I rejoined Lucilla, with my mind made up as to the
line of conduct I should adopt in the future. If Oscar did succeed in
keeping the truth concealed from her, I was positively resolved, come
what might of it, to enlighten her before they were married, with my own
lips. What! after pledging myself to keep the secret? Yes. Perish the
promise which makes me false to a person whom I love! I despise such
promises from the bottom of my heart.

Two days more slipped by--and then a telegram found its way to Browndown.
Oscar came running to us, at the rectory, with his news. Nugent had
landed at Liverpool. Oscar was to expect him at Dimchurch on the next
day.

CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD

He sets us All Right

I HAVE thus far quite inadvertently omitted to mention one of the
prominent virtues of Reverend Finch. He was an accomplished master of
that particular form of human persecution which is called reading aloud;
and he inflicted his accomplishment on his family circle at every
available opportunity. Of what we suffered on these occasions, I shall
say nothing. Let it be enough to mention that the rector thoroughly
enjoyed the pleasure of hearing his own magnificent voice.

There was no escaping Mr. Finch when the rage for "reading" seized on
him. Now on one pretense, and now on another, he descended on us
unfortunate women, book in hand; seated us at one end of the room; placed
himself at the other; opened his dreadful mouth; and fired words at us,
like shots at a target, by the hour together. Sometimes he gave us
poetical readings from Shakespeare or Milton; and sometimes Parliamentary
speeches by Burke or Sheridan. Read what he might, he made such a noise
and such a fuss over it; he put his own individuality so prominently in
the foremost place, and he kept the poets or the orators whom he was
supposed to be interpreting so far in the back ground, that they lost
every trace of character of their own, and became one and all perfectly
intolerable reflections of Mr. Finch. I date my first unhappy doubts of
the supreme excellence of Shakespeare's poetry from the rector's
readings; and I attribute to the same exasperating cause my implacable
hostility (on every question of the time) to the poli