t have five
shillings--and supper, please, Brown."

Brown drew himself up a little more stiffly.

"Lady Emily always gave 'em supper, ma'am, but, begging your pardon, she
didn't hold at all with giving 'em money."

"Oh, I don't care!" said Miss Mallory, hastily. "I'm sure they'll like
it, Brown! Five shillings, please."

Brown withdrew, and Diana, with a laughing face and her hands over her
ears, to mitigate the farewell bawling of the children, turned to Mrs.
Colwood, with an invitation to dress for church.

"The first time for me," she explained. "I have been coming up and down,
for a month or more, two or three days at a time, to see to the
furnishing. But now I am _at home!_"

* * * * *

The Christmas service in the parish church was agreeable enough. The
Beechcote pew was at the back of the church, and as the new mistress of
the old house entered and walked down the aisle, she drew the eyes of a
large congregation of rustics and small shopkeepers. Diana moved in a
kind of happy absorption, glancing gently from side to side. This
gathering of villagers was to her representative of a spiritual and
national fellowship to which she came now to be joined. The old church,
wreathed in ivy and holly; the tombs in the southern aisle; the loaves
standing near the porch for distribution after service, in accordance
with an old benefaction; the fragments of fifteenth-century glass in the
windows; the school-children to her left; the singing, the prayers, the
sermon--found her in a welcoming, a child-like mood. She knelt, she
sang, she listened, like one undergoing initiation, with a tender
aspiring light in her eyes, and an eager mobility of expression.

Mrs. Colwood was more critical. The clergyman who preached the sermon
did not, in fact, please her at all. He was a thin High Churchman, with
an oblong face and head, narrow shoulders, and a spare frame. He wore
spectacles, and his voice was disagreeably pitched. His sermon was
nevertheless remarkable. A bare yet penetrating style; a stern view of
life; the voice of a prophet, and apparently the views of a
socialist--all these he possessed. None of them, it might have been
thought, were especially fitted to capture either the female or the
rustic mind. Yet it could not be denied that the congregation was
unusually good for a village church; and by the involuntary sigh which
Miss Mallory gave as the sermon ended, Mrs. Colwood was able to