ly, looking at the Squire.

'Of course I have pensioned him,' replied the Squire impatiently;
'otherwise I imagine he would be hanging round our necks to the end of
the chapter.'

There was something in the careless indifference of the tone which sent
a shiver through Elsmere. After all, this man had served the Squire for
fifteen years, and it was not Mr. Wendover who had much to complain of.

No one with a conscience could have held out a finger to keep Henslowe
in his post. But though Elsmere took the letters and promised to
give them his best attention, as soon as he got home he made himself
irrationally miserable over the matter. It was not his fault that,
from the moment of his arrival in the parish, Henslowe had made him the
target of a vulgar and embittered hostility, and so far as he had
struck out in return it had been for the protection of persecuted and
defenseless creatures. But all the same, he could not get the thought of
the man's collapse and humiliation out of his mind. How at his age was
he to find other work, and how was he to endure life at Murewell without
his comfortable house, his smart gig, his easy command of spirits, and
the cringing of the farmers?

Tormented by the sordid misery of the situation almost as though it had
been his own, Elsmere ran down impulsively in the evening to the agent's
house. Could nothing be done to assure the man that he was not really
his enemy, and that anything the parson's influence and the parson's
money could do to help him to a more decent life, and work which offered
fewer temptations and less power over human beings, should be done?

It need hardly be said that the visit was a complete failure. Henslowe,
who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere's voice in the little
hall than he dashed open the door which separated them, and, in a
paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he
had been garnering up for months against some such occasion. The vilest
abuse, the foulest charges--there was nothing that the maddened sot, now
fairly unmasked, denied himself. Elsmere, pale and erect, tried to make
himself heard. In vain. Henslowe was physically incapable of taking in a
word.

At last the agent, beside himself, made a rush, his three untidy
children, who had been hanging open-mouthed in the background, set up
a howl of terror, and his Scotch wife, more pinched and sour than ever,
who had been so far a gloomy spectator of the scene, in