When Coristine returned, he was just in time for dinner.  He had not been missed; the entire interest of the feminine part of the community was centred in Miss Graves.  The Squire took her in, as the latest lady arrival, while Mr. Douglas escorted the hostess.  To his infinite annoyance, Coristine, who had brought in Mrs. Du Plessis, was ostentatiously set down by the side of his invalided type-writer, to whom he was the next thing to uncivil.  Miss Carmichael, between Mr. Douglas and Mr. Errol, was more than usually animated and conversational, to the worthy minister’s great delight.  The amusing man of the table was Mr. Perrowne.  His people were building him a house, which Miss Halbert and he had inspected in the morning, with a view to the addition of many cupboards, which the lady deemed indispensable to proper housekeeping.  Mr. Perrowne thought he would call the place Cubbyholes; but Miss Du Plessis asked what it would really be, the rectory, the vicarage or the parsonage?  Miss Halbert suggested the basilica, to which he replied that, while a good Catholic, he was neither Fannytic nor a Franciscan.  He derided his intended bride’s taste in architecture, and maintained that the income of a bishop would be insufficient to stock half the storerooms and wardrobes, leaving all the rest of the house unfurnished.  As it was, he feared that the charming Fanny would be in the predicament of old Mother Hubbard, while he, unfortunately, would be in that of the dog.  “In that case, Basil,” said Miss Halbert, “you would be like an inclined plane.”

“How so?” enquired Mr. Perrowne.

“An inclined plane is a slope up, you know,” answered the mischievous bride elect.

“Talking about dawgs,” remarked the victim of the terrible conundrum, “I asked a little girl belonging to one of my parishoners what kind her dawg was.  She said it had been given to her as a spanuel, but she thought it was only a currier.”

“When I was at the school,” said the Edinburgh gentleman, “a boy whom I had offended some way, offered to make the like of me with a street cur and an old gun.  He said he could make ‘one dowg less’ in the time it took to fire the gun.”

“What did you do to that boy, Mr. Douglas?” asked Miss Carmichael.

“I left him alone, for he was a good deal bigger than me.”

“You were not a Boanerges then?”

“No, I was James the Less.”

“What are you dreaming about, Mr. Coristine,” called the Squire, “to let all this wild talk go on without a word?”

“I am sorry to say I did not hear it, Squire,” replied the moody lawyer, whose little conversation had been wholly devoted to Mrs. Du Plessis.