The familiar drama of a clerical bull and a red rag was played out before her eyes, and, metaphorically speaking, she followed the example of the majority of laymen and crept up a tree to be out of the way.

When it was all over she came down trembling.

“Well! what do you think of it?” said Mr. Gresley, rising and pacing up and down the room.

“You hit very hard,” said Hester, after a moment’s consideration.  She did not say, “You strike home.”

“I have no opinion of being mealy-mouthed,” said Mr. Gresley, who was always perfectly satisfied with a vague statement.  “If you have anything worth saying, say it plainly.  That is my motto.  Don’t hint this or that, but take your stand upon a truth and strike out.”

“Why not hold out our hands to our fellow-creatures instead of striking at them?” said Hester, moving towards the door.

“I have no belief in holding out our hands to the enemies of Christ,” Mr. Gresley began, who in the course of his pamphlet had thus gracefully designated the great religious bodies who did not view Christianity through the convex glasses of his own mental pince-nez.  “In these days we see too much of that.  I leave that to the Broad Church, who want to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.  I, on the contrary—­”

But Hester had vanished.

There was a dangerous glint in her gray eyes, as she ran up to her little attic.

“According to him, our Lord must have been the first Nonconformist,” she said to herself.  “If I had stayed a moment longer I should have said so.  For once I got out of the room in time.”

Hester’s attic was blisteringly hot.  It was over the kitchen, and through the open window came the penetrating aroma of roast mutton newly wedded to boiled cabbage.  Hester had learned during the last six months all the variations of smells, evil, subtle, nauseous, and overpowering, of which the preparation of food—­and, still worse, the preparation of chicken food—­is capable.  She seized her white hat and umbrella and fled out of the house.

She moved quickly across a patch of sunlight, looking, with her large white, pink-lined umbrella, like a travelling mushroom on a slender stem, and only drew rein in the shady walk near the beehives, where the old gardener, Abel, was planting something large in the way of “runners” or “suckers,” making a separate hole for each with his thumb.

Abel was a solid, pear-shaped man, who passed through life bent double over the acre of Vicarage garden, to which he committed long lines of seeds, which an attentive Providence brought up in due season as “curly kebbidge” or “salary” or “sparrow-grass.”