As he spoke Mr. Bevis rose, and stood for a moment like a man greatly urged to stretch his arms and legs.  An air of uneasiness pervaded his whole appearance.

“Will you not stop and take tea with us?” said the curate.  “My wife will be disappointed if you do not.  You have been good to her for twenty years, she says.”

“She makes an old man of me,” returned the rector musingly.  “I remember her such a tiny thing in a white frock and curls.  Tell her what we have been talking about, and beg her to excuse me.  I must go home.”

He took his hat from the table, shook hands with Wingfold, and walked back to the inn.  There he found his horses bedded, and the hostler away.  His coachman was gone too, nobody knew whither.

To sleep at the inn would have given pointed offense, but he would rather have done so than go back to the Manor House to hear his curate abused.  With the help of the barmaid, he put the horses to the carriage himself, and to the astonishment of Mrs. Ramshorn and his wife, drew up at the door of the Manor House.

Expostulation on the part of the former was vain.  The latter made none:  it was much the same to Mrs. Bevis where she was, so long as she was with her husband.  Indeed few things were more pleasant to her than sitting in the carriage alone, contemplating the back of Mr. Bevis on the box, and the motion of his elbows as he drove.  Mrs. Ramshorn received their adieux very stiffly, and never after mentioned the rector without adding the epithet, “poor man!”

Mrs. Bevis enjoyed the drive; Mr. Bevis did not.  The doubt was growing stronger and stronger all the way, that he had not behaved like a gentleman in his relation to the head of the church.  He had naturally, as I have already shown, a fine, honorable, boyish if not childlike nature; and the eyes of his mind were not so dim with good living as one might have feared from the look of those in his head:  in the glass of loyalty he now saw himself a defaulter; in the scales of honor he weighed and found himself wanting.  Of true discipleship was not now the question:  he had not behaved like an honorable gentleman to Jesus Christ.  It was only in a spasm of terror St. Peter had denied him:  John Bevis had for nigh forty years been taking his pay, and for the last thirty at least had done nothing in return.  Either Jesus Christ did not care, and then what was the church?—­what the whole system of things called Christianity?—­or he did care, and what then was John Bevis in the eyes of his Master?  When they reached home, he went neither to the stable nor the study, but, without even lighting a cigar, walked out on the neighboring heath, where he found the universe rather gray about him.  When he returned he tried to behave as usual, but his wife saw that he scarcely ate at supper, and left half of his brandy and water.  She set it down to the annoyance the curate had caused him, and wisely forbore troubling him with questions.