Here Mrs. Bell turned ghastly pale.  Mrs. Butler saw that she had unexpectedly driven a nail home, and with fiendish glee pursued her advantage.

“A visitor! oh, yes, all the lodgings were full, packed! and it was so convenient to take in a visitor a—­friend. Hunt the baker has been speaking about it.  I didn’t listen—­I make it a point never to listen to gossip—­but Maria—­Maria, you can come here now.  Have the goodness, Maria, to tell Mrs. Bell exactly what Hunt said, when you went in to buy the brown loaf for me last Friday.”

“Oh, sister—­I—­I really don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember!  Piddle dumpling!  You remembered well enough when you came back all agog with the news.  I reproved you for listening to idle gossip, and you read a sermon of Blair’s on evil speaking aloud to me that night.  You shall read sermon ten to-night.  It’s on lying.  Well, Mrs. Bell, I can repeat what my poor sister has forgotten.  It was only to the effect that you and Bell must have had a windfall left you, and he never knew a visitor treated so well as you treated yours.  The dainty cakes you had to get her, and the fuss over her, and every blessed thing paid down for with silver of the realm.  Well, well, sometimes it is convenient to have a visitor.  But now I must leave.  Maria, we’ll be going.  You have got to get to your sermon on lying as soon as possible.  Good-bye, Mrs. Bell.  Perhaps you’ll be able to tell some one else why the whole town is talking about Miss Hart—­whoever Miss Hart is—­and about Beatrice, and the wedding being put off—­and Captain Bertram going off into high hysterics in—­(Maria, you can go back to the window)—­in a certain young lady’s private room.  Now I’m off.  Come, Maria.”

CHAPTER XXX.

GUARDIANS ARE NOT ALWAYS TO BE ENVIED.

It would have been difficult to find a more easy-going, kind, happy-tempered man than Mr. Ingram.  He had never married—­this was not because he had not loved.  Stories were whispered about him, and these stories had truth for their foundation—­that when he was young he had been engaged to a girl of high birth, great beauty of person, and rare nobility of mind.  Evelyn St. Just had died in her youth, and Mr. Ingram for her sake had never brought a wife home to the pleasant old Rectory.  His sorrow had softened, but in no degree soured the good man.  There had been nothing in it to sour any one—­no shade of bitterness, no thread of unfaithfulness.  The Rector firmly believed in a future state of bliss and reunion, and he regarded his happiness as only deferred.  As far as his flock knew, the sorrow which had come to him in his youth only gave him a peculiar sympathy for peculiar troubles.  To all in sorrow the Rector was the best of friends, but if the case was one where hearts were touched, if that love which binds a man to a woman was in any way the cause of the distress, then the Rector was indeed aroused to give of his best to comfort and assist.