As soon as his visitors arrived, he and his curate went away together, and Mrs. Wingfold was shown into the drawing-room, where was Mrs. Bevis with her knitting.  A greater contrast than that of the two ladies then seated together in the long, low, dusky room, it were not easy to imagine.  I am greatly puzzled to think what conscious good in life Mrs. Bevis enjoyed—­just as I am puzzled to understand the eagerness with which horses, not hungry, and evidently in full enjoyment of the sun and air and easy exercise, will yet hurry to their stable the moment their heads are turned in the direction of them.  Is it that they have no hope in the unknown, and then alone, in all the vicissitudes of their day, know their destination?  Would but some good kind widow, of the same type with Mrs. Bevis, without children, tell me wherefore she is unwilling to die!  She has no special friend to whom she unbosoms herself—­indeed, so far as any one knows, she has never had any thing of which to unbosom herself.  She has no pet—­dog or cat or monkey or macaw, and has never been seen to hug a child.  She never reads poetry—­I doubt if she knows more than the first line of How doth.  She reads neither novels nor history, and looks at the newspaper as if the type were fly-spots.  Yet there she sits smiling!  Why! oh! why?  Probably she does not know.  Never did question, not to say doubt, cause those soft, square-ended fingers to move one atom less measuredly in the construction of Mrs. Bevis’s muffetee, the sole knittable thing her nature seemed capable of.  Never was sock seen on her needles; the turning of the heel was too much for her.  That she had her virtues, however, was plain from the fact that her servants staid with her years and years; and I can, beside, from observation set down a few of them.  She never asked her husband what he would have for dinner.  When he was ready to go out with her, she was always ready too.  She never gave one true reason, and kept back a truer—­possibly there was not room for two thoughts at once in her brain.  She never screwed down a dependent; never kept small tradespeople waiting for their money; never refused a reasonable request.  In fact, she was a stuffed bag of virtues; the bag was of no great size, but neither were the virtues insignificant.  There are dozens of sorts of people I should feel a far stronger objection to living with; but what puzzles me is how she contrives to live with herself, never questioning the comfort of the arrangement, or desiring that it should one day come to an end.  Surely she must be deep, and know some secret!

For the other lady, Helen Lingard that was, she had since her marriage altered considerably in the right direction.  She used to be a little dry, a little stiff, and a little stately.  To the last I should be far from objecting, were it not that her stateliness was of the mechanical sort, belonging to the spine, and not to a soul uplift.  Now it had left her spine and settled in a soul that scorned the low and