“Another clergyman!” said Vera, with a soft laugh, just lifting up her hands and letting them fall down again upon her lap, with a little, half-foreign movement of impatience.  “Are there, then, no other men but the clergy in this country?”

“And a very good thing if there were no others,” glared the old lady, defiantly, over her spectacles.

“I do not like them,” said Vera, simply.

“Not like them!  Considering that I am the daughter, the widow, and the mother of clergymen, I consider that remark a deliberate insult to me!”

“Dear Mrs. Daintree, I am sure Vera never meant——­” cried Marion, trembling for fear of a fresh battle.

“Don’t interrupt me, Marion; you ought to have more proper pride than to stand by and hear the Church reviled.”

“Vera only said she did not like them.”

“No more I do, Marion,” said Vera, stifling a yawn—­“not when they are young; when they are old, like Eustace, they are far better; but when they are young they are all exactly alike—­equally harmless when out of the pulpit, and equally wearisome when in it!”

A few moments of offended silence on the part of the elder lady, during which she tugs fiercely and savagely at the ragged sock in her hands—­then she bursts forth again.

“You may scorn them as much as you like, but let me tell you that the life of a clergyman’s wife—­honoured, respected, and useful—­is a more profitable one than the idle existence which you lead, utterly purposeless and lazy.  You never do one single thing from morning till night.”

“What shall I do?  Shall I help you to darn Eustace’s socks?” reaching at one of them out of the basket.

Mrs. Daintree wrenched it angrily from her hand.

“Good gracious! as if you could!  What a bungle it would be.  Why, I never saw you with a piece of work in your hand in my life.  I dare say you could not even thread a needle.”

“I am quite sure I have never threaded one yet,” laughed Vera, lazily.  “I might try; but you see you won’t let me be useful, so I had better resign myself to idleness.”  And then she rose and took her hat, and went out through the French window, out among the fallen yellow leaves, leaving the other women to discuss the vexed problem of her existence.

She discussed it to herself as she walked dreamily along under the trees in the lane beyond the garden, her head bent, and her eyes fixed upon the ground; she swung her hat idly in her hand, for it was warm for the time of year, and the gold-brown leaves fluttered down about her head and rustled under the dark, trailing skirts behind her.

About half a mile up the lane, beyond the vicarage, stood an old iron gateway leading into a park.  It was flanked by square red-brick columns, upon whose summits two stone griffins, “rampant,” had looked each other in the face for the space of some two hundred years or so, peering grimly over the tops of the shields against which they stood on end, upon which all the family arms and quarterings of the Kynastons had become softly coated over by an indistinct veil of gray-green moss.