in streaks of light through the shutter-chinks lend
startling winks and smiles to ancestors on canvas, twelve or fifteen thin
stems of blue smoke sprouted upwards from these chimney-tops, and spread
into a flat canopy on high. Around the site stretched ten thousand acres
of good, fat, unimpeachable soil, plentiful in glades and lawns wherever
visible from the castle-windows, and merging in homely arable where
screened from the too curious eye by ingeniously-contrived plantations.

Some way behind the owner of all this came the second man in the parish,
the rector, the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Oldbourne, a widower, over
stiff and stern for a clergyman, whose severe white neckcloth, well-kept
gray hair, and right-lined face betokened none of those sympathetic
traits whereon depends so much of a parson's power to do good among his
fellow-creatures. The last, far-removed man of the series--altogether
the Neptune of these local primaries--was the curate, Mr. Alwyn Hill. He
was a handsome young deacon with curly hair, dreamy eyes--so dreamy that
to look long into them was like ascending and floating among summer
clouds--a complexion as fresh as a flower, and a chin absolutely
beardless. Though his age was about twenty-five, he looked not much over
nineteen.

The rector had a daughter called Emmeline, of so sweet and simple a
nature that her beauty was discovered, measured, and inventoried by
almost everybody in that part of the country before it was suspected by
herself to exist. She had been bred in comparative solitude; a
rencounter with men troubled and confused her. Whenever a strange
visitor came to her father's house she slipped into the orchard and
remained till he was gone, ridiculing her weakness in apostrophes, but
unable to overcome it. Her virtues lay in no resistant force of
character, but in a natural inappetency for evil things, which to her
were as unmeaning as joints of flesh to a herbivorous creature. Her
charms of person, manner, and mind, had been clear for some time to the
Antinous in orders, and no less so to the Duke, who, though scandalously
ignorant of dainty phrases, ever showing a clumsy manner towards the
gentler sex, and, in short, not at all a lady's man, took fire to a
degree that was wellnigh terrible at sudden sight of Emmeline, a short
time after she was turned seventeen.

It occurred one afternoon at the corner of a shrubbery between the castle
and the rectory, where the Duke wa