al; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in
her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his
cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned
forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein
which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.

"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty--"cannot, so it would
seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look
for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples
and warnings."

The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields
and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.

His hand touched the little liqueur glass. He picked it up and in a
second of abstraction tried to drain its oily emptiness.

"Let me ring," said Mrs. Falconer, "and send for some more Benedictine,
or better still, for some _fine_."

"No," he refused, and sedately put her right. "No more of anything, I
think, unless it might be a bottle of soda. You spoke of lovely
Glousceshire and then spoke of The Dials. Do you know the place?"

Only, she told him, by hearsay.

He solemnly supposed so; so he himself chiefly knew it, as indeed all
the country side was growing to know it.

The eyes of the lady to whom the rector was retailing his little gossip
were intently on him. But Mrs. Falconer in reality was not looking at
him, neither did she at once find ready words to refute, to cast down,
to blot out, his hideous suggestion that filled the room with it sooty
blot.

Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense
Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type,
now looked sharply at her companion.

The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the
indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives.
Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in
the comedies and dramas of her _contemporains_. But there are ways and
channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another.

The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very
beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared,
never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all
save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such
peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector
was not able or sufficiently daring to af