me--me!--I shall insult him,--that's all! No use arguing
with me, Molly,--I shall indeed." She softens this awful threat by a
merry sweet-tempered little laugh.

"Let us forget the little lawyer and talk of something we all
enjoy,--to-day's sermon, for instance. You admired it, Potts, didn't
you? I never saw any one so attentive in my life," says Sir Penthony.

Potts tries to look as if he had never succumbed during service to
"Nature's sweet restorer;" and Molly says, apologetically:

"How could he help it? The sermon was so long."

"Yes, wasn't it?" agrees Plantagenet, eagerly. "The longest I ever
heard. That man deserves to be suppressed or excommunicated; and the
parishioners ought to send him a round robin to that effect. Odd, too,
how much at sea one feels with a strange prayer-book. One looks for
one's prayer at the top of the page, where it always used to be in
one's own particular edition, and, lo! one finds it at the bottom.
Whatever you may do for the future, Lady Stafford, don't lend me your
prayer-book. But for the incessant trouble it caused me, between losing
my place and finding it again, I don't believe I should have dropped
into that gentle doze."

"Had you ever a prayer-book of your own?" asks Cecil, unkindly.
"Because if so it is a pity you don't air it now and again. I have
known you a great many years,--more than I care to count,--and never,
never have I seen you with the vestige of one. I shall send you a
pocket edition as a Christmas-box."

"Thanks awfully. I shall value it for the giver's sake. And I promise
you that when next we meet--such care shall it receive--even _you_
will be unable to discover a scratch on it."

"Plantagenet, you are a bad boy," says Cecil.

"I thought the choir rather good," Molly is saying; "but why must a man
read the service in a long, slow, tearful tone? Surely there is no good
to be gained by it; and to find one's self at 'Amen' when he is only in
the middle of the prayer has something intolerably irritating about it.
I could have shaken that curate."

"Why didn't you?" says Sir Penthony. "I would have backed you up with
the greatest pleasure. The person I liked best was the old gentleman
with the lint-white locks who said 'Yamen' so persistently in the wrong
place all through; I grew quite interested at last, and knew the exact
spot where it was likely to come in. I must say I admire consistency."

"How hard it is to keep one's attention fixed," Molly s