him, if you’ll excuse my saying so.  But that sort of chap wants it giving him hot and strong.  He doesn’t understand anything else.  He gets quite beyond himself, fizzing about on his little pocket-handkerchief of a parish, thinking he is a sort of god, because no one makes it their business to keep him in his place, and rub it into him that he is an infernal fool.  That is why some clergymen jaw so, because they never have it brought home to them what rot they talk.  They’d be no sillier than other men if they were only treated properly.  I was very calm, but I let him have it.  I told him he was a mean sneak, and that either he was the biggest fool or the biggest rogue going, and that the mere fact of his cloth did not give him the right to do dishonest things with other people’s property, though it did save him from the pounding he richly deserved.  He tried to interrupt; indeed, he was tooting all the time like a fog-horn, but I did not take any notice, and I wound up by saying it was men like him who brought discredit on the Church and on the clergy, and who made the gorge rise of decent chaps like me.  Yes,” said Dick, after a pause, “when I left him he understood, I don’t say entirely, but he had a distant glimmering.  It isn’t often I go on these errands of mercy, but I felt that the least I could do was to back you up, my lord.  Of course, it is in little matters like this that lay helpers come in, who are not so hampered about their language as I suppose the clergy are.”

The Bishop tried, he tried hard, to look severe, but his mouth twitched.

“Don’t thank me,” said Dick.  “Nothing is a trouble where you are concerned.  It was—­ahem—­a pleasure.”

“That I can believe,” said the Bishop.  “Well, Dick, Providence makes use of strange instruments—­the jawbone of an ass has a certain Scriptural prestige.  I dare say you reached poor Gresley where I failed.  I certainly failed.  But, if it is not too much to ask, I should regard it as a favor another time if I might be informed beforehand what direction your diocesan aid was about to take.”

Dr. Brown, who often came to luncheon at the Palace, came in now.  He took off his leathern driving-gloves and held his hands to the fire.

“Cold,” he said.  “They’re skating everywhere.  How is Miss Gresley?”

“She knows us to-day,” said Rachel, “and she is quite cheerful.”

“Does the poor thing know her book is burned?”

“No.  She was speaking this morning of its coming out in the spring.”

The little doctor thrust out his underlip and changed the subject.

“I travelled from Pontesbury this morning,” he said, “with that man who was nearly drowned at Beaumere in the summer.  I doctored him at Wilderleigh.  Tall, thin, rather a fine gentleman.  I forget his name.”

Dr. Brown aways spoke of men above himself in the social scale as “fine gentlemen.”

“Mr. Redman,” said Miss Keane, the Bishop’s sister, a dignified person, who had been hampered throughout life by a predilection for the wrong name, and by making engagements in illegible handwriting by last year’s almanacs.