Father Lawrence came to see her one April day when the young lambs were bleating on the sheltered innings and making bright clean spots of white beside the ewes’ fog-soiled fleeces, when the tegs had come down from their winter keep inland, and the sunset fell in long golden slats across the first water-green grass of spring.  The years had aged him more than they had aged Joanna—­the marks on her face were chiefly weather marks, tokens of her exposure to marsh suns and winds, and of her own ruthless applications of yellow soap.  Behind them was a little of the hardness which comes when a woman has to fight many battles and has won her victories largely through the sacrifice of her resources.  The lines on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other people’s sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil that the share turns up.

Joanna received him in state, with Arthur Alce’s teapot and her best pink silk blouse with the lace insertion.  Ellen, for fairly obvious reasons, preferred not to be present.  Joanna was terrified lest he should begin to talk of Martin, so after she had conformed to local etiquette by inquiring after his health and abusing the weather, she offered him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and a slice of cake almost in the same breath.

She was surprised and a little hurt when he refused the former.  As a member of a religious community he could not hold preferment, and he had no vocation to settled Christianity.

“I shouldn’t be at all good as a country clergyman.  Besides, Jo”—­he had at once slipped into the brotherliness of their old relations—­“I know you; you wouldn’t like my ways.  You’d always be up at me, teaching me better, and then I should be up at you, and possibly we shouldn’t stay quite such good friends as we are now.”

“I shouldn’t mind your ways.  Reckon it might do the folks round here a proper lot of good to be prayed over same as you—­I mean I’d like to see a few of ’em prayed over when they were dying and couldn’t help themselves.  Serve them right, I say, for not praying when they’re alive, and some who won’t put their noses in church except for a harvest thanksgiving.  No, if you’ll only come here, Lawrence, you may do what you like in the way of prayers and such.  I shan’t interfere as long as you don’t trouble us with the Pope, whom I never could abide after all I’ve heard of him, wanting to blow up the Established Church in London, and making people kiss his toe, which I’d never do, not if he was to burn me alive.”

“Well, if that’s the only limit to your toleration I think I could help you, even though I can’t come myself.  I know one or two excellent priests who would do endless good in a place like this.”