look of protest as admonitory as he could
make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But
just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed
to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their
little private eddy was effaced. The squire had been telling an
anecdote, and his clerical neighbours had been laughing at it.

'Ah!' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a
chuckle, 'that was an Archbishop worth having!'

'A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it,
however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed
to Robert that the squire's keen eye, as he sat looking down the table,
with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed
upon himself.

'May we hear the story?' he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly
smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and
moved out of her ordinary quiet.

'It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,' said Mr. Wendover, in his
dry nasal voice. 'You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop
Heber's consecration to the See of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop
to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth
which followed the ceremony. "I have very little advice to give you as
to your future career," he said to the young bishop, "but all that
experience has given me I hand on to you. Place before your eyes two
precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other
is--_Put down enthusiasm!_"'

There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the squire's look as he
told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert. Robert divined in
a moment that the story had been re-told for his special benefit, and
that in some unexplained way the relations between him and the squire
were already biassed. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and
falling back into his place made no comment on the squire's anecdote.
Lady Charlotte's eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the
distant figure of the rector, with regard to whom she had been asking
Dr. Meyrick for particulars, quite unmindful of Catherine's
neighbourhood, turned back again towards the squire.

'An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,' she said
briskly. 'And a very good thing for him that he lived when he did. Our
modern good people would have dusted his apron for him.'

Lady Charlotte prided her