Phyllis sat alone in one of the drawing rooms, waiting until the hour of four should arrive and bring into her presence the Rev. George Holland, to plead his cause to her—­to plead to be returned to her favor.  He had written to her to say that he would make such an attempt.

She had looked on him with favor for several months—­with especial favor for three months, for three months had just passed since she had promised to marry him, believing that to be the wife of a clergyman who, though still young, had two curates to do the rough work for him—­clerical charwomen, so to speak—­would make her the happiest of womankind.  Mr. Holland was rector of St. Chad’s, Battenberg Square, and he was thought very highly of even by his own curates, who intoned all the commonplace, everyday prayers in the liturgy for him, leaving him to do all the high-class ones, and to repeat the Commandments. (A rector cannot be expected to do journeyman’s work, as it were; and it is understood that a bishop will only be asked to intone three short prayers, those from behind a barrier, too; an archbishop refuses to do more than pronounce the benediction.)

The Rev. George Holland was a good-looking man of perhaps a year or two over thirty.  He did not come of a very good family—­a fact which probably accounted for his cleverness at Oxford and in the world.  He was a Fellow of his college, though he had not been appointed rector of St. Chad’s for this reason.  The appointment, as is well known (in the Church, at any rate), is the gift of the Earl of Earlscourt, and it so happened that, when at college together, George Holland had saved the young man who a year or two afterward became Earl of Earlscourt from a very great misfortune.  The facts of the case were these:  Tommy Trebovoir, as he was then, had made up his mind to marry a lady whose piquant style of beauty made the tobacconist’s shop where she served the most popular in town.  By the exercise of a great deal of diplomacy and the expenditure of a little money, Mr. Holland brought about a match between her and quite another man—­a man who was not even on a subsidiary path to a peerage, and whose only connection with the university was due to his hiring out horses to those whom he called the “young gents.”  Tommy was so indignant with his friend for the part he had played in this transaction he ceased to speak to him, and went the length of openly insulting him.  Six years afterward, when he had become Earl of Earlscourt, and had espoused the daughter of a duke,—­a lady who was greatly interested in the advance of temperance,—­he had presented George Holland with the living at St. Chad’s.

People then said that Lord Earlscourt was a lesser fool than some of his acts suggested.  Others said that the Rev. George Holland had never been a fool, though he had been a Fellow of his college.