“I have never seen any one who wore such extraordinary bonnets,” said Lady Atherley.

“Who was that young man who bowed to the altar and crossed himself?” asked the Canon.

“I suppose that must be Mr. Austyn, curate in charge at Rood Warren.  He comes over to help Mr. Jackson sometimes, I believe.  George has met him; I have not.  I want to get him over to dinner.  He is a nephew of Mr. Austyn of Temple Leigh.”

“Oh, that family!” said the Canon.  “I am sorry he has taken up such an extreme line.  It is a great mistake.  In the Church, preferment in these days always goes to the moderate men.”

“Rood Warren is not far from here,” said Lady Atherley, “and he has a parishioner—­Oh, that reminds me.  Mr. Lyndsay, would you be so kind as to look out and tell the coachman to drive round by Monk’s?  I want to leave some soup.”

“Monk, I presume, is a sick labourer?” said the Canon.  “I hope you are not as indiscriminate in your charities as most Ladies Bountiful.”

“Mr. Jackson says this is a really deserving case.  He knows all about him, though he really is in Mr. Austyn’s parish.  Monk has never had anything from the parish, and been working hard all his life, and he is past seventy.  He was breaking stones on the road a few weeks ago; but he caught a chill or something one very cold day, and has been laid up ever since.  This is the house.  Oh, Mr. Lyndsay, you should not trouble to get out.  As you are so kind, will you carry this in?”

The interior of the tiny thatched cottage was scrupulously clean and neat, as they nearly all are in the valley, but barer and more scantily furnished than most of them.  No photographs or pictures decorated the white-washed walls, no scraps of carpet or matting hid the red-brick floor.  The Monks were evidently of the poorest.  An old piece of faded curtain had been hung from a rope between the chimney-piece and the door to shield the patient from the draught.  He sat in a stiff wooden arm-chair near the fire, drawing his breath laboriously.  “He was better now,” said his wife, a nurse as old and as frail-looking as himself.  “Nights was the worst.”  His shoulders were bent, his hair white with age, his withered features almost as coarse and as unshapely as the poor clothes he wore.  The mask had been rough-hewn, to begin with; time and exposure had further defaced it.  No gleam of intellectual life transpierced and illumined all.  It was the face of an animal—­ugly, ignorant, honest, patient.  As I looked at it there came over me a rush of the pity I have so often felt for this suffering of age in poverty—­so unpicturesque, so unwinning, to shallow sight so unpathetic—­and I put out my hand and let it rest for a moment on his own, knotted with rheumatism, stained and seamed with toil.  Then he looked up at me from under his shaggy brows with haggard, wistful eyes, and gasped:  “It’s hard work, sir; it’s hard work.”  And I went out into the sunshine, feeling that I had heard the epitome of his life.