twardly calm.

"You have been guilty of indelicacy," he said. "Continue in your
delusion, think what you like, do what you like. The matter will go on.
Good-evening, sir."

And turning on his heel, he left the room.

Mr. Barter stepped forward. The words, "You have been guilty of
indelicacy," whirled round his brain till every blood vessel in his face
and neck was swollen to bursting, and with a hoarse sound like that of an
animal in pain he pursued Gregory to the door. It was shut in his face.
And since on taking Orders he had abandoned for ever the use of bad
language, he was very near an apoplectic fit. Suddenly he became aware
that Mrs. Pendyce was looking at him from the conservatory door. Her
face was painfully white, her eyebrows lifted, and before that look Mr.
Barter recovered a measure of self-possession.

"Is anything the matter, Mr. Barter?"

The Rector smiled grimly.

"Nothing, nothing," he said. "I must ask you to excuse me, that's all.
I've a parish matter to attend to."

When he found himself in the drive, the feeling of vertigo and
suffocation passed, but left him unrelieved. He had, in fact, happened
on one of those psychological moments which enable a man's true nature to
show itself. Accustomed to say of himself bluffly, "Yes, yes; I've a hot
temper, soon over," he had never, owing to the autocracy of his position,
had a chance of knowing the tenacity of his soul. So accustomed and so
able for many years to vent displeasure at once, he did not himself know
the wealth of his old English spirit, did not know of what an ugly grip
he was capable. He did not even know it at this minute, conscious only
of a sort of black wonder at this monstrous conduct to a man in his
position, doing his simple duty. The more he reflected, the more
intolerable did it seem that a woman like this Mrs. Bellew should have
the impudence to invoke the law of the land in her favour a woman who was
no better than a common baggage--a woman he had seen kissing George
Pendyce. To have suggested to Mr. Barter that there was something
pathetic in this black wonder of his, pathetic in the spectacle of his
little soul delivering its little judgments, stumbling its little way
along with such blind certainty under the huge heavens, amongst millions
of organisms as important as itself, would have astounded him; and with
every step he took the blacker became his wonder, the more fixed his
determination to permit no such