“Not altogether,” said the rector, with a kindly look from his box, which, however, only fell on the top of the doctor’s hat.

Faber seemed to feel the influence of it notwithstanding, for he returned,

“If all clergymen were as liberal as you, Mr. Bevis, there would be more danger of some of us giving in.”

The word liberal seemed to rouse the rector to the fact that his coachman sat on the box, yet another conscience, beside him. Sub divo one must not be too liberal.  There was a freedom that came out better over a bottle of wine than over the backs of horses.  With a word he quickened the pace of his cleric steeds, and the doctor was dropped parallel with the carriage window.  There, catching sight of Mrs. Bevis, of whose possible presence he had not thought once, he paid his compliments, and made his apologies, then trotted his gaunt Ruber again beside the wheel, and resumed talk, but not the same talk, with the rector.  For a few minutes it turned upon the state of this and that ailing parishioner; for, while the rector left all the duties of public service to his curate, he ministered to the ailing and poor upon and immediately around his own little property, which was in that corner of his parish furthest from the town; but ere long, as all talk was sure to do between the parson and any body who owned but a donkey, it veered round in a certain direction.

“You don’t seem to feed that horse of yours upon beans, Faber,” he said.

“I don’t seem, I grant,” returned the doctor; “but you should see him feed!  He eats enough for two, but he can’t make fat:  all goes to muscle and pluck.”

“Well, I must allow the less fat he has to carry the better, if you’re in the way of heaving him over such hedges on to the hard road.  In my best days I should never have faced a jump like that in cold blood,” said the rector.

“I’ve got no little belongings of wife or child to make a prudent man of me, you see,” returned the surgeon.  “At worst it’s but a knock on the head and a longish snooze.”

The rector fancied he felt his wife’s shudder shake the carriage, but the sensation was of his own producing.  The careless defiant words wrought in him an unaccountable kind of terror:  it seemed almost as if they had rushed of themselves from his own lips.

“Take care, my dear sir,” he said solemnly.  “There may be something to believe, though you don’t believe it.”

“I must take the chance,” replied Faber.  “I will do my best to make calamity of long life, by keeping the rheumatic and epileptic and phthisical alive, while I know how.  Where nothing can be known, I prefer not to intrude.”

A pause followed.  At length said the rector,

“You are so good a fellow, Faber, I wish you were better.  When will you come and dine with me?”

“Soon, I hope,” answered the surgeon, “but I am too busy at present.  For all her sweet ways and looks, the spring is not friendly to man, and my work is to wage war with nature.”