Turning slowly out of the Vicarage gate came a good-looking clergyman of seven-or-eight-and-twenty.  A slender man of middle height, with a sweet expression on his pale, thoughtful face, and dark earnest eyes.  It was the new Vicar of Church Leet, the Reverend Robert Grame.

For a goodish many years have gone on since that tragedy of poor Katherine’s death, and this is the second appointed Vicar since that inauspicious time.

Mr. Grame walked across the churchyard, glancing at the inscriptions on the tombs.  Inside the church porch stood the clerk, old John Cale, keys in hand.  Mr. Grame saw him and quickened his pace.

“Have I kept you waiting, Cale?” he cried in his pleasant, considerate tones.  “I am sorry for that.”

“Not at all, your reverence; I came afore the time.  This here church is but a step or two off my home, yonder, and I’m as often out here as I be indoors,” continued John Cale, a fresh-coloured little man with pale grey eyes and white hair.  “I’ve been clerk here, sir, for seven-and-thirty years.”

“You’ve seen more than one parson out then, I reckon.”

“More than one!  Ay, sir, more than—­more than six times one, I was going to say; but that’s too much, maybe.  Let’s see:  there was Mr. Cartright, he had held the living I hardly know how many years when I came, and he held it for many after that.  Mr. West succeeded him—­the Reverend George West; then came Thomas Dancox; then Mr. Atterley:  four in all.  And now you’ve come, sir, to make the fifth.”

“Did they all die? or take other livings?”

“Some the one thing, sir, and some the other.  Mr. Cartright died, he was old; and Mr. West, he—­he—­” John Cale hesitated before he went on—­“he died; Mr. Dancox got appointed to a chaplaincy somewhere over the seas; he was here but about eighteen months, hardly that; and Mr. Atterley, who has just left, has had a big church with a big income, they say, given to him over in Oxfordshire.”

“Which makes room for me,” smiled Robert Grame.

They were inside the church now; a small and very old-fashioned church, with high pews, dark and sombre.  Over the large pew of the Monks, standing sideways to the pulpit, sundry slabs were on the wall, their inscriptions testifying to the virtues and ages of the Monk family dead and gone.  Mr. Grame stood to read them.  One slab of white marble, its black letters fresh and clear, caught especially his eye.

“Katherine, eldest child of Godfrey Monk, gentleman, and wife of the Reverend Thomas Dancox,” he read out aloud.  “Was that he who was Vicar here?”

“Ay, ’twas.  She married him again her father’s wish, and died, poor thing, just a year after it,” replied the clerk.  “And only twenty-three, as you see, sir!  The Captain came down and forgave her on her dying bed, and ’twas he that had the stone put up there.  Her baby-girl was taken to the Hall, and is there still:  ten years old she must be now; ’twas but an hour or two old when the mother died.”