his new chauffeur Briggins (parenthetically it
may be remarked that a seven-hour excursion in this vehicle, youth in
the back seat and Briggins at the helm, all ordained by Peggy, had
been the final cause of the evening's explanations), with the starry
heavens above, with the well-ordered earth beneath them, and with all
human beings on the earth, including Germans, Turks, Infidels, and
Hereticks--all save one: and that, as he learned from a letter
delivered by the last post, was a callous, heartless London manicurist
who, giving no reasons, regretted that she would be unable to pay her
usual weekly visit to Durdlebury on the morrow. Of all days in the
year: just when it was essential that he should look his best!

"What the deuce am I going to do?" he cried, pitching the letter into
the waste-paper basket.

He sat down to the piano in the peacock and ivory room and tried to
play the nasty crumpled rose-leaf of a manicurist out of his mind.

Suddenly he remembered, with a kind of shock, that he had pledged
himself to go up to London the next day to buy an engagement-ring. So
after all the manicurist's defection did not matter. All was again
well with the world.

Then he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just and perfect man
living the just and perfect life in a just and perfect universe.

And the date of this happening was the fifteenth day of July in the
year of grace one thousand nine hundred and fourteen.

CHAPTER III

The shadow cast by the great apse of the cathedral slanted over the
end of the Deanery garden, leaving the house in the blaze of the
afternoon sun, and divided the old red-brick wall into a vivid
contrast of tones. The peace of centuries brooded over the place. No
outside convulsions could ever cause a flutter of her calm wings. As
it was thirty years ago, when the Dean first came to Durdlebury, as it
was three hundred, six hundred years ago, so it was now; and so it
would be hundreds of years hence as long as that majestic pile housing
the Spirit of God should last.

Thus thought, thus, in some such words, proclaimed the Dean, sitting
in the shade, with his hands clasped behind his head. Tea was over.
Mrs. Conover, thin and faded, still sat by the little table, wondering
whether she might now blow out the lamp beneath the silver kettle. Sir
Archibald Bruce, a neighbouring landowner, and his wife had come,
bringing their daughter Dorothy to play tennis. The game had already
start