“No, no,” said Priscilla smiling, “young Mr. Morrison.  I see him over there tying up my creepers.  He’s so kind.  He’ll go.  I’ll ask him.”

And nodding good-bye she hurried out of the garden and over to her cottage, almost running in her desire not to keep Mrs. Jones any longer in suspense.

The two women, rooted to the ground, watched her as if fascinated, saw her speak to Robin on his ladder, saw how he started and dropped his nails, saw how nimbly he clambered down, and how after the shortest parley the infatuated youth rushed away at once in the direction of the Cock and Hens.  The only thing they did not see from where they stood was the twinkle in his eye.

“I don’t think,” murmured Lady Shuttleworth, “I don’t think, my dear, that I quite care to go in to Mrs. Jones to-day.  I—­I think I’ll go home.”

“So shall I,” said Mrs. Morrison, biting her lips to keep them steady.  “I shall go and speak to the vicar.”

XI

What she meant by speaking to the vicar was a vigorous stirring of him up to wrath; but you cannot stir up vicars if they are truly good.  The vicar was a pious and patient old man, practiced in forgiveness, in overlooking, in waiting, in trying again.  Always slow to anger, as the years drew him more and more apart into the shadows of old age and he watched from their clear coolness with an ever larger comprehension the younger generations striving together in the heat, he grew at last unable to be angered at all.  The scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down upon your wrath had no uses for him, for he possessed no wrath for the sun to go down upon.  He had that lovable nature that sees the best in everything first, and then prefers to look no further.  He took for granted that people were at bottom good and noble, and the assumption went a long way towards making them so.  Robin, for instance, was probably saved by his father’s unclouded faith in him.  Mrs. Morrison, a woman who had much trouble with herself, having come into the world with the wings of the angel in her well glued down and prevented from spreading by a multitude of little defects, had been helped without her knowing it by his example out of many a pit of peevishness and passion.  Who shall measure the influence of one kind and blameless life?  His wife, in her gustier moments, thought it sheer weakness, this persistent turning away from evil, this refusal to investigate and dissect, to take sides, to wrestle.  The evil was there, and it was making an ostrich or a vegetable of one’s self to go on being calm in the face of it.  With the blindness of wives, who are prevented from seeing clearly by the very closeness of the object—­the same remark exactly applies to husbands—­she did not see that the vicar was the candle shining in a naughty world, that he was the leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.  And just as leaven leavens by its mere presence in the lump, by merely passively