er hand, and the half mocking, half inviting look in her eyes, with the
feeling of a child shut out from a garden where he well knows the ripe
apples are hanging; only not for him. The atmosphere of sex which
environed her--was it not that which had beguiled the vicar, while it had
repelled his sister? And yet Eleanor Shenstone did most honestly wish
her brother to marry--only not--not anything so tempting, troubling, and
absorbing as Rachel Henderson.

"Haven't we a tiresome meeting to-night?" said the vicar with an
impatient sigh, as he sat languidly down to the couple of sardines which
were all his sister had allowed him for breakfast.

"Yes--Miss Hall is coming to speak."

Miss Hall was a lady who spoke prodigiously on infant welfare, and had a
way of producing a great, but merely temporary effect on the mothers of
the village. They would listen in a frightened silence while she showed
them on a blackboard the terrifying creatures that had their dwelling in
milk, and what a fly looks like when it is hideously--and in the mothers'
opinion most unnecessarily--magnified. But when she was gone came
reaction. "How can she know aught about it--havin' none of her own?"
said the village contemptuously. None the less the village ways were
yielding, insensibly, little by little; and the Miss Halls were after all
building better than they knew.

The vicar, however, always had to take the chair at Miss Hall's meetings,
and he was secretly sick and tired of babies, their weights, their foods,
their feeding-bottles, and everything concerned with them. His sister
considered him and like a wise woman, offered him something sweet to
make up for the bitter.

"Do you think you could possibly take a note for me to Miss Leighton this
morning--when you go to see old Frant?"

"Old Frant" was a labourer on the point of death to whom the vicar was
ministering.

He pricked up his ears.

"Great End's hardly in old Frant's direction."

_Camouflage_, of course. Miss Shenstone understood perfectly.

"It won't take you far out of your way. I want Miss Leighton to send
those two girls to the Armistice dance to-night if they'd like to come.
Lady Alicia writes that several of her maids are down with the flu, and
she asks me to give away two or three more tickets."

"Why doesn't Lady Alicia let the servants manage the thing themselves
when she gives them a party? _They_ ought to invite. I wouldn't be bossed
if I were they," said the vica