t, and there's an end."

"I am sure she never meant it," said the younger sister. "She was only
just flattered for a moment, weren't you, Lizzie? and pleased to think
of some one new."

"That's about the fact, that is," said the old woman. "Something new;
them lasses would just give their souls for something new."

"But Lizzie must know," said Miss Warrender, "that her old customers would
never stand it. I was going to talk about some work, and of coming up
two days next week to the Warren. But if there is any idea of the--other
place----"

"For goodness' sake speak up and say, No, miss, there ain't no thought
of it, Lizzie!"

"Now I know you're so strong against it, of course I can't, and there's
an end," said Lizzie; but she looked more angry than convinced.

CHAPTER X.

The girls went round by the rectory on their way home. It was a large
red brick house, taller almost than the church, which was a very old
church, credibly dating from the thirteenth century, with a Norman arch
to the chancel, which tourists came to see. The rectory was of the days
of Anne, three stories high, with many twinkling windows in framework
of white, and a great deal of ivy and some livelier climbing plants
covering the walls, with the old mellow red bricks looking through
the interstices of all this greenery. The two Miss Warrenders did not
stop to knock or ring, but opened the door from the outside, and went
straight through the house, across the hall and a passage at the other
end, to the garden beyond, where Mrs. Wilberforce sat under some great
limes, with her little tea-table beside her. She was alone; that is, as
near alone as she ever was, with only two of the little ones playing at
her feet, and the little Skye comfortably disposed on the cushions of
a low wicker-work chair. The two sisters kissed her, and disturbed the
children's game to kiss them, and displaced the little Skye, who did
not like it at all. Mrs. Wilberforce was a little roundabout woman, with
fair hair and a permanent pucker in her forehead. She was very well
off,--she and all her belongings; the living was good, the parish small,
the work not overpowering: but she never was able to shake off a visionary
anxiety, the burden of some ancestral trouble, or the premonition of
something to come. She was always afraid that something was going to
happen: her husband to break down from overwork (which for clergymen, as
for most other people in this generatio