cupboard in which Carlyle was used to keep his boots.  So that there was quite a struggle between them; she holding grimly on to the door inside and Carlyle equally determined to open it and get his boots.  It had ended in her exposure, with trembling knees and scarlet face, and Carlyle had addressed her as “woman,” and had insisted on knowing what she was doing there.  And after that she had lost all terror of him.  And he had even allowed her with a grim smile to enter occasionally the sacred study with her broom and pan.  It had evidently made a lasting impression upon her, that privilege.

“They didn’t get on very well together, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle?” Joan queried, scenting the opportunity of obtaining first-class evidence.

“There wasn’t much difference, so far as I could see, between them and most of us,” answered the little old lady.  “You’re not married, dear,” she continued, glancing at Joan’s ungloved hand, “but people must have a deal of patience when they have to live with us for twenty-four hours a day.  You see, little things we do and say without thinking, and little ways we have that we do not notice ourselves, may all the time be irritating to other people.”

“What about the other people irritating us?” suggested Joan.

“Yes, dear, and of course that can happen too,” agreed the little old lady.

“Did he, Carlyle, ever come to this church?” asked Joan.

Mary Stopperton was afraid he never had, in spite of its being so near.  “And yet he was a dear good Christian—­in his way,” Mary Stopperton felt sure.

“How do you mean ’in his way’?” demanded Joan.  It certainly, if Froude was to be trusted, could not have been the orthodox way.

“Well, you see, dear,” explained the little old lady, “he gave up things.  He could have ridden in his carriage”—­she was quoting, it seemed, the words of the Carlyles’ old servant—­“if he’d written the sort of lies that people pay for being told, instead of throwing the truth at their head.”

“But even that would not make him a Christian,” argued Joan.

“It is part of it, dear, isn’t it?” insisted Mary Stopperton.  “To suffer for one’s faith.  I think Jesus must have liked him for that.”

They had commenced with the narrow strip of burial ground lying between the south side of the church and Cheyne Walk.  And there the little pew-opener had showed her the grave of Anna, afterwards Mrs. Spragg.  “Who long declining wedlock and aspiring above her sex fought under her brother with arms and manly attire in a flagship against the French.”  As also of Mary Astell, her contemporary, who had written a spirited “Essay in Defence of the Fair Sex.”  So there had been a Suffrage Movement as far back as in the days of Pope and Swift.