had been tortured
and frizzled to look as much like an aureole as possible. But, on the
other hand, she was a beauty, though at present you felt her a beauty in
disguise, a stage Cinderella as it were, in very becoming rags, waiting
for the godmother.

'Yes, I had tea at the vicarage,' said this young person, throwing
herself on the grass in spite of a murmured protest from Agnes, who had
an inherent dislike of anything physically rash, 'and I had the greatest
difficulty to get away. Mrs. Thornburgh is in such a flutter about this
visit! One would think it was the Bishop and all his Canons, and
promotion depending on it, she has baked so many cakes and put out so
many dinner napkins! I don't envy the young man. She will have no wits
left at all to entertain him with. I actually wound up by administering
some sal-volatile to her.'

'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out of
her on the subject of the young man?'

'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only
remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In
between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we
had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making of them and the
cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a
young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular
preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her
when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I
held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to the point again,
gently, but firmly, and now I think I know all I want to know about the
interesting stranger.'

'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently
up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order in
them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy
Land, and his hair has been cut close after a fever. It sounds odd, but
I am not curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.'

'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't get that sort of
thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he went to
college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his mother's
peculiarities, which seem to be Irish and curious, where his living is,
how much it is worth, likewise the colour of his eyes, as near as Mrs.
Thornburgh can get.'

'What a start you have been getting!' said Agnes lazily.