asped and whispered to
his grandson,--

"Wheer's the brandy to?"

Whereupon this boy produced a medicine bottle half full of spirits, and
his grandfather, with shaking fingers, removed the cork and drank the
contents. Meantime the Vicar had begun to speak; but he suffered another
interruption. Billy, tearing himself from the miller's restraining hand,
leapt to his feet, literally shaking with rage. He was dead to his
position, oblivious of every fact save that his banns of marriage had
been forbidden before the assembled Christians of Chagford. He had
waited to find a wife until he was sixty years old--for this!

"You--_you_ to do it! You to get up afore this rally o' gentlefolks an'
forbid my holy banns, you wrinkled, crinkled, baggering auld lizard!
Gormed if I doan't wring your--"

"Silence in the house of God!" thundered Mr. Shorto-Champernowne, with
tones so resonant that they woke rafter echoes the organ itself had
never roused. "Silence, and cease this sacrilegious brawling, or the
consequences will be unutterably serious! Let those involved," he
concluded more calmly, "appear before me in the vestry after divine
service is at an end."

Having frowned, in a very tragic manner, both on Mr. Blee and Mr.
Lezzard, the Vicar proceeded with the service; but though Gaffer
remained in his place Billy did not. He rose, jammed on his hat, glared
at everybody, and assumed an expression curiously similar to that of a
stone demon which grinned from the groining of two arches immediately
above him. He then departed, growling to himself and shaking his fists,
in another awful silence; for the Vicar ceased when he rose, and not
until Billy disappeared and his footfall was heard no more did the angry
clergyman proceed.

A buzz and hubbub, mostly of laughter, ascended when presently Mr.
Shorto-Champernowne's parishioners returned to the air; and any chance
spectator beholding them had certainly judged he stood before an
audience now dismissed from a theatre rather than the congregation of a
church.

"Glad Will weern't theer, I'm sure," said Mrs. Blanchard. "He'd 'a'
laughed out loud an' made bad worse. Chris did as 't was, awnly parson's
roarin' luckily drowned it. And Mr. Martin Grimbal, whose eye I catched,
was put to it to help smilin'."

"Ban't often he laughs, anyway," said Phoebe, who walked homewards with
her father and the Blanchards; whereon Chris, from being in a boisterous
vein of merriment, grew grave. Toget