One day, when the old gentleman was coming up Orchard Street on his roan mare, shaking the bridle, and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there was a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace, Janet happened to be on her own door-step, and he could not resist the temptation of stopping to speak to that ’nice little woman’, as he always called her, though she was taller than all the rest of his feminine acquaintances.  Janet, in spite of her disposition to take her husband’s part in all public matters, could bear no malice against her old friend; so they shook hands.

’Well, Mrs. Dempster, I’m sorry to my heart not to see you sometimes, that I am,’ said Mr. Jerome, in a plaintive tone.  ’But if you’ve got any poor people as wants help, and you know’s deservin’, send ’em to me, send ‘em to me, just the same.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Jerome, that I will.  Good-bye.’

Janet made the interview as short as she could, but it was not short enough to escape the observation of her husband, who, as she feared, was on his mid-day return from his office at the other end of the street, and this offence of hers, in speaking to Mr. Jerome, was the frequently recurring theme of Mr. Dempster’s objurgatory domestic eloquence.

Associating the loss of his old client with Mr. Tryan’s influence, Dempster began to know more distinctly why he hated the obnoxious curate.  But a passionate hate, as well as a passionate love, demands some leisure and mental freedom.  Persecution and revenge, like courtship and toadyism, will not prosper without a considerable expenditure of time and ingenuity, and these are not to spare with a man whose law-business and liver are both beginning to show unpleasant symptoms.  Such was the disagreeable turn affairs were taking with Mr. Dempster, and, like the general distracted by home intrigues, he was too much harassed himself to lay ingenious plans for harassing the enemy.

Meanwhile, the evening lecture drew larger and larger congregations; not perhaps attracting many from that select aristocratic circle in which the Lowmes and Pittmans were predominant, but winning the larger proportion of Mr. Crewe’s morning and afternoon hearers, and thinning Mr. Stickney’s evening audiences at Salem.  Evangelicalism was making its way in Milby, and gradually diffusing its subtle odour into chambers that were bolted and barred against it.  The movement, like all other religious ‘revivals’, had a mixed effect.  Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.  It may be that some of Mr. Tryan’s hearers had gained a religious vocabulary rather than religious experience; that here and there a weaver’s wife, who, a few months before, had been simply a silly slattern, was converted into that