But the vicar noticed.  The vicar was disappointed.  Usually his good friend and supporter Mrs. Arbuthnot succeeded better than this.  And, what was even more unusual, she appeared, he observed, not even to mind.

“I can’t imagine,” he said to her as they parted, speaking irritably, for he was irritated both by the audience and by her, “what these people are coming to.  Nothing seems to move them.”

“Perhaps they need a holiday,” suggested Mrs. Arbuthnot; an unsatisfactory, a queer reply, the vicar thought.

“In February?” he called after her sarcastically.

“Oh no—­not till April,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot over her shoulder.

“Very odd,” thought the vicar.  “Very odd indeed.”  And he went home and was not perhaps quite Christian to his wife.

That night in her prayers Mrs. Arbuthnot asked for guidance.  She felt she ought really to ask, straight out and roundly, that the mediaeval castle should already have been taken by some one else and the whole thing thus be settled, but her courage failed her.  Suppose her prayer were to be answered?  No; she couldn’t ask it; she couldn’t risk it.  And after all—­she almost pointed this out to God—­if she spent her present nest-egg on a holiday she could quite soon accumulate another.  Frederick pressed money on her; and it would only mean, while she rolled up a second egg, that for a time her contributions to the parish charities would be less.  And then it could be the next nest-egg whose original corruption would be purged away by the use to which it was finally put.

For Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged to live on the proceeds of Frederick’s activities, and her very nest-egg was the fruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin.  The way Frederick made his living was one of the standing distresses of her life.  He wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the mistresses of kings.  There were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during each year of his married life, and even so there were greater further piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with.  Mrs. Arbuthnot was helpless.  Whether she liked it or not, she was obliged to live on the proceeds.  He gave her a dreadful sofa once, after the success of his Du Barri memoir, with swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it seemed to her a miserable thing that there, in her very home, should flaunt this re-incarnation of a dead old French sinner.