The Reverend Martin Bedel, the then vicar of Golden Friars, a stout short man, with a mulberry-coloured face and small gray eyes, and taciturn habits, called and entered the drawing-room at Mardykes Hall, with his fat and garrulous wife on his arm.

The drawing-room has a great projecting Tudor window looking out on the lake, with its magnificent background of furrowed and purple mountains.

Sir Bale was not there, and Mrs. Bedel examined the pictures, and ornaments, and the books, making such remarks as she saw fit; and then she looked out of the window, and admired the prospect.  She wished to stand well with the Baronet, and was in a mood to praise everything.

You may suppose she was curious to see him, having heard for years such strange tales of his doings.

She expected the hero of a brilliant and wicked romance; and listened for the step of the truant Lovelace who was to fulfil her idea of manly beauty and fascination.

She sustained a slight shock when he did appear.

Sir Bale Mardykes was, as she might easily have remembered, a middle-aged man—­and he looked it.  He was not even an imposing-looking man for his time of life:  he was of about the middle height, slightly made, and dark featured.  She had expected something of the gaiety and animation of Versailles, and an evident cultivation of the art of pleasing.  What she did see was a remarkable gravity, not to say gloom, of countenance—­the only feature of which that struck her being a pair of large dark-gray eyes, that were cold and earnest.  His manners had the ease of perfect confidence; and his talk and air were those of a person who might have known how to please, if it were worth the trouble, but who did not care twopence whether he pleased or not.

He made them each a bow, courtly enough, but there was no smile—­not even an affectation of cordiality.  Sir Bale, however, was chatty, and did not seem to care much what he said, or what people thought of him; and there was a suspicion of sarcasm in what he said that the rustic literality of good Mrs. Bedel did not always detect.

“I believe I have not a clergyman but you, sir, within any reasonable distance?”

“Golden Friars is the nearest,” said Mrs. Bedel, answering, as was her pleasure on all practicable occasions, for her husband.  “And southwards, the nearest is Wyllarden—­and by a bird’s flight that is thirteen miles and a half, and by the road more than nineteen—­twenty, I may say, by the road.  Ha, ha, ha! it is a long way to look for a clergyman.”

“Twenty miles of road to carry you thirteen miles across, hey?  The road-makers lead you a pretty dance here; those gentlemen know how to make money, and like to show people the scenery from a variety of points.  No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey’s end.”