with
anything; which I thought at the time was rather an experiment, only it
answered, as many of Mr. Gray's deeds of daring did. It was curious how
he was growing to be a kind of autocrat in the village; and how
unconscious he was of it. He was as shy and awkward and nervous as ever
in any affair that was not of some moral consequence to him. But as soon
as he was convinced that a thing was right, he "shut his eyes and ran and
butted at it like a ram," as Captain James once expressed it, in talking
over something Mr. Gray had done. People in the village said, "they
never knew what the parson would be at next;" or they might have said,
"where his reverence would next turn up." For I have heard of his
marching right into the middle of a set of poachers, gathered together
for some desperate midnight enterprise, or walking into a public-house
that lay just beyond the bounds of my lady's estate, and in that extra-
parochial piece of ground I named long ago, and which was considered the
rendezvous of all the ne'er-do-weel characters for miles round, and where
a parson and a constable were held in much the same kind of esteem as
unwelcome visitors. And yet Mr. Gray had his long fits of depression, in
which he felt as if he were doing nothing, making no way in his work,
useless and unprofitable, and better out of the world than in it. In
comparison with the work he had set himself to do, what he did seemed to
be nothing. I suppose it was constitutional, those attacks of lowness of
spirits which he had about this time; perhaps a part of the nervousness
which made him always so awkward when he came to the Hall. Even Mrs.
Medlicott, who almost worshipped the ground he trod on, as the saying is,
owned that Mr. Gray never entered one of my lady's rooms without knocking
down something, and too often breaking it. He would much sooner have
faced a desperate poacher than a young lady any day. At least so we
thought.

I do not know how it was that it came to pass that my lady became
reconciled to Miss Galindo about this time. Whether it was that her
ladyship was weary of the unspoken coolness with her old friend; or that
the specimens of delicate sewing and fine spinning at the school had
mollified her towards Miss Bessy; but I was surprised to learn one day
that Miss Galindo and her young friend were coming that very evening to
tea at the Hall. This information was given me by Mrs. Medlicott, as a
message from my lady, who