Wanhope also, though modest by comparison, had a good deal of land attached to it, but the Clowes property lay north up the Plain, where they sowed the headlands with red wheat still as in the days of Justice Shallow.  The shining Mere, a tributary of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills:  strange pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that imitated in verdure the bold sweep of masonry.

Mr. Stafford was a man of sixty, white-haired and of sensitive, intelligent features.  He was a High Churchman, but wore a felt wideawake in winter because when he bought it wideawakes were the fashion for High Churchmen.  In the summer he usually roved about his parish without any hat at all, his white curls flying in the wind.  He was of gentle birth, which tended to ease his intercourse with the Castle.  He had a hundred a year of his own, and the living of Chilmark was worth 175 pounds net.  So it may have been partly from necessity that he went about in clothes at which any respectable tramp would have turned his nose up:  but idiosyncrasy alone can have inspired him to get the village tailor to line his short blue pilot jacket with pink flannelette.  “It’s very warm and comfortable, my dear,” he said apologetically to his wife, who sat and gazed at him aghast, “so much more cosy than Italian cloth.”

On that occasion Mrs. Stafford was too late to interfere, but as a rule she exercised a restraining influence, and while she lived the vicar was not allowed to go about with holes in his trousers.  After her death Mr. Stafford mourned her sincerely and cherished her memory, but all the same he was glad to be able to wear his old boots.  However, he had a cold bath every morning and kept his hands irreproachable, not from vanity but from an inbred instinct of personal care.  Yvonne of the Castle, who spoke her mind as Yvonne’s of the Castle commonly do, said that the fewer clothes Mr. Stafford wore the better she liked him, because he was always clean and they were not.

Mr. Stafford had three children; Val, late of the Dorchester Regiment, Rowsley an Artillery lieutenant two years younger, and Isabel the curate, a tall slip of a girl of nineteen.  They were all beloved, but Val was the prop of the family and the pride of his father’s heart.  Invalided out of the Army after six weeks’ fighting, with an honourable distinction and an irremediably shattered arm, he had been given the agency of the Wanhope property, and lived at home, where the greater part of his three hundred a year went to pay the family bills.  Most of these were for what Mr. Stafford gave away, for the vicar had no idea of the value of money, and was equally generous with Val’s income and his own.