er reflected, advertising the fact she bore
no shadow of malice towards her youthful hostess for that neatly
delivered rebuff.

After this sort, therefore, was gossip, for the time being at all events,
scotched if not actually killed. Parochial excitement flagged the sooner,
no doubt, because, of the four persons chiefly responsible for its
creation, two were invisible and the remaining two apparently quite
unconscious of its ever having existed.--Mrs. Lesbia Faircloth, at the
Inn, the Vicar's wife left out of the count.--If Sir Charles Verity and
Damaris had hurried away, gossip would have run after them with liveliest
yelpings. But this practise of masterly inactivity routed criticism. How
far was it studied, cynical on the part of the father, or innocent upon
that of the daughter, she could not tell one bit; but that practically it
carried success along with it, she saw to be indubitable. "Face the music
and the band stops playing"--so she put it to herself, as she walked down
the drive to the front gate, her James--was he just a trifle crestfallen,
good man?--strolling, umbrella in hand, beside her.

All subsequent outbreaks of gossip may be described as merely sporadic.
They did not spread. As when, for instance, peppery little Dr.
Cripps--still smarting under Dr. McCabe's introduction into preserves he
had reckoned exclusively his own--advised himself to throw off a nasty
word or so on the subject to Commander Battye and Captain Taylor, over
strong waters and cigars in his surgery--tea, the ladies, and the
card-table left to their own devices in the drawing-room meanwhile--one
evening after a rubber of whist.

"Damn bad taste, I call it, in a newcomer like Cripps," the sailor had
remarked later to the soldier. "But if a man isn't a gentleman what can
you expect?"--And with that, as among local persons of quality, the
matter finally dropped.

Mrs. Doubleday and Butcher Cleave, to give an example from a lower social
level, agreed, across the former's counter in the village shop, that--

"It is the duty of every true Christian to let bygones be bygones--and a
downright flying in the face of Providence, as you may say, to do
otherwise, when good customers, whose money you're sure of, are so
scarce. For without The Hard and--to give everyone their due--without the
Island also, where would trade have been in Deadham these ten years and
more past? Mum's the word, take it from me,"--and each did take it from
the othe