e?"

The vicar's wife said no more, but silently made up her mind to go the
very next day and call at Baker's. It would be terrible if a bad
influence got into Symford, her parish that she had kept in such good
order for so long. Besides, she had an official position as the wife
of the vicar and could and ought to call on everybody. Her call would
not bind her, any more than the call of a district visitor would, to
invite the called-upon to her house. Perhaps they were quite decent,
and she could ask the girl up to the Tuesday evenings in the
parish-room; hardly to the vicarage, because of her daughter Netta. On
the other hand, if they looked like what she imagined anarchists or
forgers look like, she would merely leave leaflets and be out when
they returned her call.

Robin, all unaware of his mother's thoughts, was longing to ask her to
go to Baker's and take him with her as a first step towards the
acquaintance after which his soul thirsted, but he refrained for
various discreet reasons based on an intimate knowledge of his
mother's character; and he spent the evening perfecting a plan that
should introduce him into the interior of Baker's without her help.
The plan was of a barbarous simplicity: he was going to choose an
umbrella from the collection that years had brought together in the
stand in the hall, and go boldly and ask the man Neumann if he had
dropped it in the churchyard. The man Neumann would repudiate the
umbrella, perhaps with secret indignation, but he would be forced to
pretend he was grateful, and who knew what luck might not do for him
after that?

While Robin was plotting, and his mother was plotting, that the next
day would certainly see them inside Baker's, a third person was trying
to do exactly the same thing at Symford Hall; and this third person
was no other than Augustus, the hope of all the Shuttleworths.
Augustus--he was known to his friends briefly as Tussie--had been
riding homewards late that afternoon, very slowly, for he was an
anxious young man who spent much of his time dodging things like being
overheated, when he saw a female figure walking towards him along the
lonely road. He was up on the heath above Symford, a solitary place of
heather, and gorse bushes, and winding roads that lead with many
hesitations and delays to different parts of Exmoor, and he himself
with his back to that wild region and the sunset was going, as every
sensible person would be going at that time of