Felicia Verity, now thoroughly frightened, darted forward.  The fronts of her blue coat again flew apart, and that rich garment stood out in a prodigious frill around and behind her from the waist, as she leaned on the wind, almost running in her agitation and haste.

“My dear Canon,” she cried, “I am in such anxiety.  I learn something has happened to my niece, who I had come to meet.  Our good servants are so distractingly mysterious.  They refer me to you.  Pray relieve my uncertainty and suspense.”

But, even while she spoke, Miss Felicia’s anxiety deepened, for the kindly, easy-going clergyman appeared to suffer, like the servants, from some uncommon shock.  His large fleshy nose and somewhat pendulous cheeks were a mottled, purplish red.  Anger and deprecation struggled in his glance.

“I was on my way to The Hard,” he began, “to express my regrets—­offer my apologies would hardly be too strong a phrase—­to your niece, Miss Verity, and to yourself.  For I felt compelled, without any delay, to dissociate myself from the intemperate procedure of my colleague—­of my curate.  He has used, or rather misused, his official position, has grievously misused the privileges of the pulpit—­the pulpit of our parish church—­to attack the reputation of private individuals and resuscitate long-buried scandals.”

The speaker was, unquestionably, greatly distressed.  Miss Felicia, though more than ever bewildered, felt for him warmly.  It pained her excessively to observe how his large hands clasped and unclasped, how his loose lips worked.

“Let me assure you,” he went on, “though I trust that is superfluous—­”

“I am certain it is, dear Dr. Horniblow,” she feelingly declared.

“Thanks,” he replied.  “You are most kind, most indulgent to me, Miss Verity.—­Superfluous, I would say, to assure you that my colleague adopted this deplorable course without my knowledge or sanction.  He sprang it on me like a bomb-shell.  As a Christian my conscience, as a gentleman my sense of fair play, condemns his action.”

“Yes—­yes—­I sympathize.—­I am convinced you are incapable of any indiscretion, any unkindness, in the pulpit or out of it.  But why, my dear Canon, apologize to us?  How can this unfortunate sermon affect me or my niece?  How can the scandal you hint at in any respect concern us?”

“Because,” he began, that mottling of purple increasingly deforming his amiable face.—­And there words failed him, incontinently he stuck.  He detested strong language, but—­heavens and earth—­how could he put it to her, as she gazed at him with startled, candid eyes, innocent of guile as those of a babe?  Only too certainly no word had reached her of the truth.  The good man groaned in spirit for, like Patch, he found himself in a place of quite unexampled tightness, and with no hope of shunting the immense discomfort of it on to alien shoulders such as had been granted the happier Patch.