erfect the comeliness of the garment cannot
be much," said the vicar, almost woefully. After that, the dean
relented, and the comeliness of the coat was made perfect. The new
black long frock, I think Mr. Crawley liked; but the dress coat, with
the suit complete, perplexed him sorely.

With his new coats, and something also, of new manners, he and his
wife went over to Plumstead, leaving Jane at the deanery with Mrs
Arabin. The dean also went to Plumstead. They arrived there not much
before dinner, and as Grace was there before them the first moments
were not so bad. Before Mr. Crawley had had time to feel himself lost
in the drawing-room, he was summoned away to prepare himself for
dinner,--for dinner, and for the coat, which at the deanery he had
been allowed to leave unworn. "I would with all my heart that I might
retire to rest," he said to his wife, when the ceremony had been
perfected.

"Do not say so. Go down and take your place with them, and speak your
mind with them,--as you so well know how. Who among them can do it so
well?"

"I have been told," said Mr. Crawley, "that you shall take a cock
which is lord of the farmyard,--the cock of all that walk,--and when
you have daubed his feathers with mud, he shall be thrashed by every
dunghill coward. I say not that I was ever the cock of the walk, but
I know that they have daubed my feathers." Then he went down among
the other poultry into the farmyard.

At dinner he was very silent, answering, however, with a sort of
graceful stateliness any word that Mrs. Grantly addressed to him. Mr
Thorne, from Ullathorne, was there also to meet his new vicar, as was
also Mr. Thorne's very old sister, Miss Monica Thorne. And Lady Anne
Grantly was there,--she having come with the expressed intention that
the wives of the two brothers should know each other,--but with a
warmer desire, I think, of seeing Mr. Crawley, of whom the clerical
world had been talking much since some notice of the accusation
against him had become general. There were, therefore, ten or twelve
at the dinner-table, and Mr. Crawley had not made one at such a board
certainly since his marriage. All went fairly smoothly with him till
the ladies left the room; for though Lady Anne, who sat at his left
hand, had perplexed him somewhat with clerical questions, he had
found that he was not called upon for much more than monosyllabic
responses. But in his heart he feared the archdeacon, and he felt
that when t