“Emma,” said Mrs. Morrison in passing, “you have not returned the book I lent you.  Bring it up this afternoon.”

“Please mum, I’ll bring it to-morrow, mum,” said the girl, curtseying and turning red.

“No, Emma, you will do as I direct.  One can never be too particular about returning books.  You have kept it an unconscionable time.  You will bring it to the vicarage at four o’clock.”

“Please mum, I—­I can’t at four o’clock.”

“And pray, Emma, what is to prevent you?”

“I—­I’m going to Baker’s, mum.”

“Going to Baker’s?  Why are you going to Baker’s, Emma?”

So it all came out.

The bells were just stopping, and Mrs. Morrison, who played the organ, was forced to hurry in without having told Emma her whole opinion of those who gave and those who attended Sunday parties, but the prelude she played that day expressed the tumult of her mind very well, and struck Tussie Shuttleworth, who had sensitive ears, quite cold.  He was the only person in the church acutely sensitive to sound, and it was very afflicting to him, this plunging among the pedals, this angry shrieking of stops no man ever yet had heard together.  The very blower seemed frightened, and blew in gasps; and the startled Tussie, comparing the sounds to the clamourings of a fiend in pain, could not possibly guess they were merely the musical expression of the state of a just woman’s soul.

Mrs. Morrison’s anger was perfectly proper.  It had been the conscientious endeavour of twenty-five solid years of her life to make of Symford a model parish, and working under Lady Shuttleworth, whose power was great since all the cottages were her son’s and were lived in by his own labourers, it had been kept in a state of order so nearly perfect as to raise it to the position of an example to the adjoining parishes.  The church was full, the Sunday-school well attended, the Sabbath was kept holy, the women were one and all sober and thrifty, the men were fairly satisfactory except on Saturday nights, there was no want, little sickness, and very seldom downright sin.  The expression downright sin is Mrs. Morrison’s own,—­heaven forbid that I should have anything to do with such an expression—­and I suppose she meant by it thieving, murder, and other grossnesses that would bring the sinner, as she often told her awe-struck Dorcas class, to infallible gallows, and the sinner’s parents’ grey hairs to sorrowful graves.  “Please mum, will the parents go too?” asked a girl one day who had listened breathlessly, an inquiring-minded girl who liked to get to the root of things.

“Go where, Bessie?”

“With the grey hairs, mum.”

Mrs. Morrison paused a moment and fixed a searching gaze on Bessie’s face.  Then she said with much dignity, “The parents, Bessie, will naturally follow the hairs.”  And to a girl bred in the near neighbourhood of Exmoor it sounded very sporting.