Mrs. Morrison gave the pink tulle bow she liked to wear in the afternoons at her throat an agitated pat, and tried to conceal her misery that Augustus Shuttleworth should also have succumbed to Miss Neumann-Schultz.  That he had done so was very clear from Lady Shuttleworth’s portentous remarks, for it was not in human nature for a woman to be thus solemn about the wasted emotions of other people’s sons.  His doing so might save Robin’s future, but it would ruin Netta’s.  We all have our little plans for the future—­dear rosy things that we dote on and hug to our bosoms with more tenderness even than we hug the babies of our bodies, and the very rosiest and best developed of Mrs. Morrison’s darling plans was the marriage of her daughter Netta with the rich young man Augustus.  It was receiving a rude knock on its hopeful little head at this moment in old Mrs. Jones’s front garden, and naturally the author of its being winced.  Augustus, she feared, must be extremely far gone in love, and it was not likely that the girl would let such a chance go.  It was a consolation that the marriage would be a scandal,—­this person from nowhere, this niece of a German teacher, carrying off the wealthiest young man in the county.  The ways of so-called Providence were quite criminally inscrutable, she thought, in stark defiance of what a vicar’s wife should think; but then she was greatly goaded.

Priscilla herself came out of Mrs. Jones’s door at that moment with a very happy face.  She had succeeded in comforting the sick woman to an extent that surprised her.  The sick woman had cheered up so suddenly and so much that Priscilla, delighted, had at once concluded that work among the sick poor was her true vocation.  And how easy it had been!  A few smiles, a few kind words, a five-pound note put gently into the withered old hands, and behold the thing was done.  Never was sick woman so much comforted as Mrs. Jones.  She who had been disinclined to speak above a whisper when Priscilla went in was able at the end of the visit to pour forth conversation in streams, and quite loud conversation, and even interspersed with chuckles.  All Friday Priscilla had tried to help in the arranging of her cottage, and had made herself and Fritzing so tired over it that on Saturday she let him go up alone and decided that she would, for her part, now begin to do good to the people in the village.  It was what she intended to do in future.  It was to be the chief work of her new life.  She was going to live like the poor and among them, smooth away their sorrows and increase their joys, give them, as it were, a cheery arm along the rough path of poverty, and in doing it get down herself out of the clouds to the very soil, to the very beginnings and solid elementary facts of life.  And she would do it at once, and not sit idle at the farm.  It was on such idle days as the day Fritzing went to Minehead that sillinesses assailed her soul—­shrinkings of the flesh from honest calico, disgust at the cooking, impatience