g her."

"Some of your wrath, I fear, falls to my lot?" said the Vicar.

"No, Frank. You and your wife have done the best for me all
through,--as far as you thought was best."

"We have meant to do so."

"And if she has been false to me as no woman was ever false before,
that is not your fault. As for the jewels, tell your wife to lock
them up,--or to throw them away if she likes that better. My
brother's wife will have them some day, I suppose." Now his brother
was in India, and his brother's wife he had never seen. Then there
was a pledge given that Gilmore would inform his friend by letter of
his future destination, and so they parted.

This was on the Tuesday, and Fenwick had desired that his gig might
meet him at the Bullhampton Road station. He had learned by this time
of the condemnation of one man for the murder, and the acquittal of
the other, and was full of the subject when his groom was seated
beside him. Had the Brattles come back to the mill? And what of
Sam? And what did the people say about Acorn's escape? These, and
many other questions he asked, but he found that his servant was
so burdened with a matter of separate and of infinitely greater
interest, that he could not be got to give his mind to the late
trial. He believed the Brattles were back; he had seen nothing of
Sam; he didn't know anything about Acorn; but the new chapel was
going to be pulled down.

"What!" exclaimed the Vicar;--"not at once?"

"So they was saying, sir, when I come away. And the men was at
it,--that is, standing all about. And there is to be no more
preaching, sir. And missus was out in the front looking at 'em as I
drove out of the yard."

Fenwick asked twenty questions, but could obtain no other information
than was given in the first announcement of these astounding news.
And as he entered the vicarage he was still asking questions, and the
man was still endeavouring to express his own conviction that that
horrible, damnable, and most heart-breaking red brick building would
be demolished, and carted clean away before the end of the week.
For the servants and dependents of the vicarage were staunch to the
interests of the church establishment, with a degree of fervour
of which the Vicar himself knew nothing. They hated Puddleham and
dissent. This groom would have liked nothing better than a commission
to punch the head of Mr. Puddleham's eldest son, a young man who had
been employed in a banker's office at Warmins