ctivities and emotions--in
as far, that is, as outward expression of these last went--were
vicarious, those of others. She glowed over and gloried in the triumph of
her father's book, it is true, but it was his adventure, after all,
rather than her own.

Then suddenly, as is the way with life, events crowded on one
another, the drama thickened, sensation was tuned to a higher pitch.
And it all began, not unludicrously, through the praiseworthy, if
rather ill-timed moral indignation of Canon Horniblow's newly
installed curate, Reginald Sawyer.

CHAPTER II

RECALLING, IN SOME PARTICULARS, THE EASIEST RECORDED THEFT IN
HUMAN HISTORY

He was short, neat, spectacled, in manner prompt and perky, in age under
thirty, a townsman by birth and education, hailing from Midlandshire.
Further, a strong advocate of organization, and imbued with the deepest
respect for the obligations and prerogatives of his profession upon the
ethical side. He took himself very seriously; and so took, also, the
decalogue as delivered to mankind amid the thunders of Sinai. Keep the
Ten Commandments, according to the letter, and you may confidently expect
all things, spiritual and temporal, to be added unto you--such was the
basis of his teaching and of his private creed.

He came to Deadham ardent for the reformation of that remote, benighted
spot, so disgracefully, as he feared--and rather hoped--behind the times.
He suspected its canon-vicar of being very much too easy-going; and its
population, in respect of moral conduct, of being lamentably lax. In
neither of which suppositions, it must be admitted, was he altogether
incorrect. But he intended to alter all that!--Regarding himself thus, in
the light of a providentially selected new broom, he applied himself
diligently to sweep. A high-minded and earnest, if not conspicuously
well-bred young man, he might in a suburban parish have done excellent
work. But upon Deadham, with its enervating, amorous climate and queer
inheritance of forest and seafaring--in other words poaching and
smuggling--blood, he was wasted, out of his element and out of touch. The
slow moving South Saxon cocked a shrewd sceptical eye at him, sized him
up and down and sucked in its cheek refusing to be impressed. While by
untoward accident, his misfortune rather than his fault, the earliest of
his moral sweepings brought him into collision with the most reactionary
element in the community, namely the inhabitants o