my thoughts returned instinctively, and they still return, to the high abode of Miss Flaw.  There was a porch at her door, both for shelter and shade, and it was covered with jasmine; but the charm of the place was a summer-house close by, containing a table, encrusted with cowry-shells, and seats from which one saw the distant waters of the bay.  At the entrance to this grotto there was always set a ‘snug elbow-chair’, destined, I suppose, for the Rev. Mr. Flaw, or else left there in pious memory of him, since I cannot recollect whether he was alive or dead.

I delighted in these visits to Mary Flaw.  She always received us with effusion, tripping forward to meet us, and leading us, each by a hand held high, with a dancing movement which I thought infinitely graceful, to the cowry-shell bower, where she would regale us with Devonshire cream and with small hard biscuits that were like pebbles.  The conversation of Mary Flaw was a great treat to me.  I enjoyed its irregularities, its waywardness; it was like a tune that wandered into several keys.  As Mary Grace Burmington put it, one never knew what dear Mary Flaw would say next, and that she did not herself know added to the charm.  She had become crazed, poor thing, in consequence of a disappointment in love, but of course I did not know that, nor that she was crazed at all.  I thought her brilliant and original, and I liked her very much.  In the light of coming events, it would be affectation were I to pretend that she did not feel a similar partiality for me.

Miss Flaw was, from the first, devoted to my Father’s ministrations, and it was part of our odd village indulgence that no one ever dreamed of preventing her from coming to the Room.  On Sunday evenings the bulk of the audience was arranged on forms, with backs to them, set in the middle of the floor, with a passage round them, while other forms were placed against the walls.  My Father preached from a lectern, facing the audience.  If darkness came on in the course of the service, Richard Moxhay, glimmering in his cream-white corduroys, used to go slowly around, lighting groups of tallow candles by the help of a box of lucifers.  Mary Flaw always assumed the place of honour, on the left extremity of the front bench, immediately opposite my Father.  Miss Marks and Mary Grace, with me ensconced and almost buried between them, occupied the right of the same bench.  While the lighting proceeded, Miss Flaw used to direct it from her seat, silently, by pointing out to Moxhay, who took no notice, what groups of candles he should light next.  She did this just as the clown in the circus directs the grooms how to move the furniture, and Moxhay paid no more attention to her than the grooms do to the clown.  Miss Flaw had another peculiarity:  she silently went through a service exactly similar to ours, but much briefer.  The course of our evening service was this:  My Father prayed, and we all knelt down; then he gave out a hymn and most of us stood up to sing; then he preached for about an hour, while we sat and listened; then a hymn again; then prayer and the valediction.