About eight o’clock on this particular morning in July the Drone could hear, if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high, unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to Mrs. Gresley and to a young thrush, which was hurling its person, like an inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his grave-clothes, now against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river’s edge and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other Scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.

The service ended at last, and, after releasing his unwilling congregation by catching and carrying it, beak agape, into the open air, Mr. Gresley and his wife walked through the church-yard—­with its one melancholy Scotch fir, embarrassed by its trouser of ivy—­to the little gate which led into their garden.

They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance.  He, at least, evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average clergyman, though his wife may not have done so.  Mr. Gresley, with his long, thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set-up figure, bore on his whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to low uses—­the maltreated, the travestied name of “gentleman.”

None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for Mr. Gresley which, we are told, distinguish the true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank Heaven! the “gentleman born” frequently lacks.  Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value—­the right outside.

To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good-breeding and a well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging.  Mr. Gresley’s suspicious eye and thin, compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel plainness.  He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth without perceiving it as a hunted hare against a stone-wall.  He was unmistakably of those who only see side issues.

Mrs. Gresley took her husband’s arm as he closed the gate.  She was still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a clergyman’s wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always wearing out old finery.  Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr. Gresley.

The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden, looking fondly at their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small, slight figure appeared on the terrace.