, by anyone in the least imaginative; though it was a rather
unsatisfactory curate from Manchester who actually gave them the name.
No one felt surprised when he afterwards offended his bishop and went
into the motor business, for he suffered from that constitutional
ability to take people as seriously as they wished to be taken, which
is so bad for any career.

Thus the curate departed, but his irreverence lived on after him for
quite a long time, because many people like a mild joke which every one
must see at once--which is ready-made--and for which they cannot be
held responsible. So this became for a little while the family jest of
Thorhaven, in no way spoiled by the fact that one sister had married a
man called Bradford and was now a widow, while the other retained the
paternal Wilson.

The two ladies were walking together on this twenty-sixth of March, by
the side of the privet hedge which divided their garden from the large
field beyond and hid from them everything which they did not care to
see.

Miss Ethel's name was entirely unsuited to her, but she had received it
at a period when Ethels were as thick as blackberries in every girls'
school of any pretensions; and she was not in the very least like any
Miss Amelia out of a book, though she possessed an elder sister and had
reached fifty-five without getting married. On the contrary, she
carried her head with great assurance on her spare shoulders, put her
hair in curling pins each night as punctually as she said her prayers,
and wore a well-cut, shortish tweed skirt with sensible shoes. Her
face was thin and she had a delicately-shaped, rather long nose,
together with a charmingly-shaped mouth that had grown compressed and
lost its sweetness. A mole over her right eyebrow accentuated her
habit of twitching that side of her face a little when she was nervous
or excited.

But she was calm now, walking there with her sister, enjoying the keen
air warmed with sunshine which makes life on such a day in Thorhaven
sparkle with possibilities.

"I'm glad," she said, "that we decided not to clip the hedge. It has
grown up until it hides that odious Emerald Avenue entirely from the
garden."

"I can still see it from my bedroom window all the same," said Mrs.
Bradford.

"Don't look out of your window, then!" retorted Miss Ethel sharply.

"You take care of that," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have made the short
blinds so high that I can scarcely see over them