able. I hope she has had a lesson."

Alick's impatient horse flew on with him, and Colin muttered to Alison
under his mufflers,--"I never could make out whether that is the coolest
or the most sensitive fellow living!"

CHAPTER XXII. THE AFTER CLAP

"I have read in the marvellous heart of man,
That strange and mystic scroll,
That an army of phantoms vast and wan
Beleaguer the human soul.

"Encamped beside life's rushing stream,
In Fancy's misty light,
Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam
Portentous through the night."
The Beleaguered City, LONGFELLOW.

A dinner party at the Deanery in the sessions week was an institution,
but Rachel, lying on the sofa in a cool room, had thought herself exempt
from it, and was conscious for the time of but one wish, namely, to be
let alone, and to be able to shut her eyes, without finding the lids, as
it were, lined with tiers of gazing faces, and curious looks turned on
her, and her ears from the echo of the roar of fury that had dreadfully
terrified both her and her mother, and she felt herself to have merited!
The crush of public censure was not at the moment so overwhelming as
the strange morbid effect of having been the focus of those many, many
glances, and if she reflected at all, it was with a weary speculating
wonder whether one pair of dark grey eyes had been among those levelled
at her. She thought that if they had, she could not have missed either
their ironical sting, or perchance some kindly gleam of sympathy, such
as had sometimes surprised her from under the flaxen lashes.

There she had lain, unmolested and conscious of a certain relief in the
exceeding calm; the grey pinnacle of the cathedral, and a few branches
of an elm-tree alone meeting her eye through the open window, and the
sole sound the cawing of the rooks, whose sailing flight amused and
attracted her glance from time to time with dreamy interest. Grace had
gone into court to hear Maria Hatherton's trial, and all was still.

The first break was when her mother and Miss Wellwood came in, after
having wandered gently together round the warm, walled Deanery garden,
comparing notes about their myrtles and geraniums. Then it was that amid
all their tender inquiries after her headache, and their administration
of afternoon tea, it first broke upon Rachel that they expected her to
go down to dinner.

"Pray excuse me," she said imploringly, looking at her mother for