‘Oh, heavens! what will become of them?’

‘What indeed?  She has been with me today.’

‘Has she?  And what could you say to her?’

’I told her at first that I could not see her, and begged her not to speak to me about it.  I tried to make her understand that she should go to someone else.  But it was of no use.’

‘And how did it end?’

’I asked her to go in to you, but she declined.  She said you could do nothing for her.’

‘And does she think her husband guilty?’

’No, indeed.  She think him guilty!  Nothing on earth—­or from heaven either, as I take it, would make her suppose it to be possible.  She came simply to tell me how good he was.’

‘I love her for that,’ said Mrs Walker.

’So did I. But what is the good of loving her?  Thank you, dearest.  I’ll get your slippers for you some day, perhaps.’

The whole county was astir with this matter of this alleged guilt of the Reverend Mr Crawley—­the whole county almost as keenly as the family of Mr Walker, of Silverbridge.  The crime laid to his charge was the theft of a cheque for twenty pounds, which he was said to have stolen out of a pocket-book left or dropped in his house, and to have passed as money into the hands of one Fletcher, a butcher of Silverbridge, to whom he was indebted.  Mr Crawley was in those days the perpetual curate of Hogglestock, a pariah in the northern extremity of East Barsetshire; a man known by all who knew anything of him to be very poor—­an unhappy, moody, disappointed man, upon whom the troubles of the world always seemed to come with a double weight.  But he had ever been respected as a clergyman, since his old friend Mr Arabin, the dean of Barchester, had given him the small incumbency which he now held.  Though moody, unhappy, and disappointed, he was a hard-working, conscientious pastor, among the poor people with whom his lot was cast; for in the parish of Hogglestock there resided only a few farmers higher in degree than field labourers, brickmakers, and such like.  Mr Crawley had now passed some ten years of his life at Hogglestock; and during those years he had worked very hard to do his duty, struggling to teach the people around him perhaps too much of the mystery, but something of the comfort, of religion.  That he had became popular in his parish cannot be said of him.  He was not a man to make himself popular in any position.  I have said that he was moody and disappointed.  He was even worse than this; he was morose, sometimes almost to insanity.  There had been days in which even his wife had found it impossible to deal with him otherwise than as with an acknowledged lunatic.  And this was known among the farmers, who talked about their clergyman among themselves as though he were a madman.  But among the very poor, among the brickmakers of Hoggle End—­a lawless, drunken, terribly rough lot of humanity—­he was held in high respect; for they knew that he lived