Voices on the lawn! Diana, peeping through the trees, beheld the Vicar
in conversation with Muriel Colwood. She turned and fled, pausing at
last in the deepest covert of the wood, breathless and a little ashamed.

She had seen him once since her return. Everybody was so kind to her,
the Vicar, the Miss Bertrams--everybody; only the pity and the kindness
burned so. She wrestled with these feelings in the wood, but she none
the less kept a thick screen between herself and Mr. Lavery.

She could never forget that night of her misery when--good man that he
was!--he had brought her the message of his faith.

But the great melting moments of life are rare, and the tracts between
are full of small frictions. What an incredible sermon he had preached
on the preceding Sunday! That any minister of the national
church--representing all sorts and conditions of men--should think it
right to bring his party politics into the pulpit in that way! Unseemly!
unpardonable!

Her dark eyes flashed--and then clouded. She had walked home from the
sermon in a heat of wrath, had straightway sought out some blue ribbon,
and made Tory rosettes for herself and her dog. Muriel had laughed--had
been delighted to see her doing it.

But the rosettes were put away now--thrown into the bottom of a drawer.
She would never wear them.

The Vicar, it seemed, was no friend of Oliver's--would not vote for him,
and had been trying to induce the miners at Hartingfield to run a Labor
man. On the other hand, she understood that the Ferrier party in the
division were dissatisfied with him on quite other grounds: that they
reproached him with a leaning to violent and extreme views, and with a
far too lukewarm support of the leader of the party and the leader's
policy. The local papers were full of grumbling letters to that effect.

Her brow knit over Oliver's difficulties. The day before, Mr. Lavery,
meeting Muriel in the village street, had suggested that Miss Mallory
might lend him the barn for a Socialist meeting--a meeting, in fact, for
the harassing and heckling of Oliver.

Had he come now to urge the same plea again? A woman's politics were
not, of course, worth remembering!

She moved on to a point where, still hidden, she could see the lawn. The
Vicar was in full career; the harsh creaking voice came to her from the
distance. What an awkward unhandsome figure, with his long, lank
countenance, his large ears and spectacled eyes! Yet an apostle, she