have died--my husband knew I should. It was the world, the
flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn't be helped. But now,'
and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging him
to a candid reply: 'You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn't you, to
tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?'

'Immeasurably,' cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense
difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh.

'Well, yes, you know. But it isn't right;' and again she sighed. 'And so
I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called--what do
you think?--"Mr. Jones." Mr. Jones is my hero--it's so good for me, you
know, to think about a Mr. Jones.'

She looked beamingly at him. 'It must be indeed! Have you endowed him
with every virtue?'

'Oh yes, and in the end, you know--' and she bent forward eagerly--'it
all comes right. His father didn't die in Brazil without children after
all, and the title--'

'What,' cried Robert, 'so he _wasn't_ Mr. Jones?'

Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious.

'Well, no,' she said guiltily, 'not just at the end. But it really
doesn't matter--not to the story.'

Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could
make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But
just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed
to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their
little private eddy was effaced. The Squire had been telling an
anecdote, and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it.

'Ah!' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a
chuckle, 'that was an Archbishop worth having!'

'A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it,
however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed
to Robert that the Squire's keen eye, as he sat looking down the table,
with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed
upon himself.

'May we hear the story?' he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly
smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and
moved out of her ordinary quiet.

'It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,' said Mr. Wendover, in
his dry, nasal voice. 'You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop
Heber's consecration to the see of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop
to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth
which followed the ceremo