Mrs. Jones made a little sound between a gasp and a sob.  Her head rolled back on the pillow, and two tears dropped helplessly down the furrows of her face.  In that moment she felt the whole crushing misery of being weak, and sick, and old,—­so old that you have outlived your claims to everything but the despotic care of charitable ladies, so old that you are a mere hurdy-gurdy, expected each time any one in search of edification chooses to turn your handle to quaver out tunes of immortality.  It is a bad thing to be very old.  Of all the bad things life forces upon us as we pass along it is the last and worst—­the bitterness at the bottom of the cup, the dregs of what for many was after all always only medicine.  Mrs. Jones had just enough of the strength of fear left to keep quite still while the vicar’s wife read the Gospel in a voice that anger made harsh; but when she had gone, after a parting admonition and a dreadful assurance that she would come again soon, the tears rolled unchecked and piteous, and it was a mercy that Priscilla also took it into her head to look in on her way to church, for if she had not I don’t know who would have dried them for this poor baby of eighty-five.  And I regret to say that Priscilla’s ideas of doing good were in such a state of crudeness that she had no sooner mastered the facts brokenly sobbed out than she ran to the cupboard and gave Mrs. Jones a tablespoonful of rum for the strengthening of her body and then took out her purse and gave her another five-pound note for the comforting of her soul.  And then she wiped her eyes, and patted her, and begged her not to mind.  Such conduct was, I suppose, what is called indiscriminate charity and therefore blameworthy, but its effect was great.  Priscilla went to church with the reflection of the old lady’s wonder and joy shining in her own face.  “Hide it,” had been her last words at the door, her finger on her lips, her head nodding expressively in the direction of the vicarage; and by this advice she ranged herself once and for all on the opposite side to Mrs. Morrison and the followers of obedience and order.  Mrs. Jones would certainly have taken her for an angel working miracles with five-pound notes and an inexhaustible pocket if it had not been for the rum; even in her rapture she did feel that a genuine angel would be incapable of any really harmonious combination with rum.  But so far had she fallen from the kind of thinking that the vicar’s wife thought proper in a person so near her end that she boldly told herself she preferred Priscilla.

Now this was the day of Priscilla’s children’s party, and though all Symford had been talking of it for twenty-four hours the news of it had not yet reached Mrs. Morrison’s ears.  The reason was that Symford talked in whispers, only too sure that the authorities would consider it wrong for it to send its children a-merrymaking on a Sunday, and desperately afraid lest the forbidden cup should be snatched from its longing lips.  But the news did get to Mrs. Morrison’s ears, and it got to them in the porch of the church as she was passing in to prayer.  She had it from an overgrown girl who was waiting outside for her father, and who was really much too big for children’s parties but had got an invitation by looking wistful at the right moment.