With the spring Annie became unbearable.  Archelaus had suddenly gone off again, after his fashion, this time to the goldfields of California, and Annie, who felt his departure bitterly, chose to blame Ishmael for it.  Christmas had been for her the occasion to revive all her religious frenzies, and the house rang with her cracked-voiced hymns till Ishmael felt he could have smothered her with her own feather-bed.  Her lust for religion, however, was taking a new direction—­it was towards the Parson and his church instead of the conventicle of Mr. Tonkin.  Quite what had brought about this change was hard to say—­probably chiefly the infatuation of Tonkin for Vassie, a circumstance Annie took as an insult to herself.

“A man on in years like him, oldern’ I be myself, and a minister before the Lard, ought to have other things to think on than wantoning with his thoughts after a maid young enough to be his daughter!  Where’s his religion, I should like to knaw?” This was Annie’s own explanation, and even she realised that against Boase no charge of thinking about women could be brought—­that quality of priesthood even her ignorance unconsciously admitted.  She approached Boase on the subject of his creed and met with scant encouragement, which made her the more earnest.  If the Parson had been anxious to receive her into the path he trod, she would have lagged; as it was, his brusqueness awaked a sensation of pleasure in her—­there was no male to snub and bully her now that Archelaus had gone away.  She set up to herself the image of Boase that some more educated women make of their doctor—­a bully who had to be placated, who would scold her if she transgressed his ideas.  She took to going to church every Sunday evening and sat in the Manor pew, every jet bead trembling on her bonnet as she kept her mind strained to attention—­always a difficult task with her for any length of time.

One wet afternoon Vassie found she was not in the house, though when she had slipped out no one could say.  Ishmael, alarmed—­for nothing could have been more unlike Annie’s habits—­was about to set out in search of her, when the kitchen door was thrust open and slammed again and Annie stood before them, soaking with wet, her arms clasping a bundle of little books and a light of sly triumph in her eyes.  Boase, shutting a dripping umbrella, was behind her.  She had been across to the Vicarage in all the wet and cold to make the Parson talk to her about her soul, and to get rid of her he had finally given her a host of little cheap devotional books that had from time to time been sent to him from the publishers, and which he himself, disliking most modern books of devotion, had not troubled to read.  He knew they were suited to the mentality of the average child of ten, and that therefore Annie with an effort might understand them and would certainly think them full of the Spirit.

He stood behind Annie, grave and quiet, signalling to Ishmael and Vassie with his eyes.  Vassie sprang forward.