On the Sunday morning the expected letter from Venice came to hand, and was read on that morning very anxiously, not only by Mrs Grantly and the major, but by the archdeacon also, in spite of the sanctity of the day.  Indeed the archdeacon had been very stoutly anti-sabbatarial when the question of stopping the Sunday post to Plumstead had been mooted in the village, giving those who on that occasion were the special friends of the postman to understand that he considered them to be numbskulls, and little better than idiots.  The postman, finding the parson to be against him, had seen that there was no chance for him, and had allowed the matter to drop.  Mrs Arabin’s letter was long and eager, and full of repetitions, but it did explain clearly to him the exact manner in which the cheque had found its way into Mr Crawley’s hand.  ’Francis came up to me,’ she said in her letter—­Francis being her husband, the dean—­’and asked me for the money, which I had promised to make up in a packet.  The packet was not ready, and he would not wait, declaring that Mr Crawley was in such a flurry that he did not like to leave him.  I was therefore to bring it down to the door.  I went to my desk, and thinking that I could spare the twenty pounds as well as the fifty, I put the cheque into the envelope, together with the notes, and handed the packet to Francis at the door.  I think I told Francis afterwards that I put seventy pounds into the envelope, instead of fifty, but of this I will not be sure.  At any rate Mr Crawley got Mr Soames’s cheque from me.’  These last words she underscored, and then went on to explain how the cheque had been paid to her a short time before by Dan Stringer.

‘Then Toogood was right about the fellow,’ said the archdeacon.

‘I hope they’ll hang him,’ said Mrs Grantly.  ’He must have known all the time what dreadful misery he was bringing upon this unfortunate family.’

‘I don’t suppose Dan Stringer cared much about that,’ said the major.

‘Not a straw,’ said the archdeacon, and then all hurried off to church; and the archdeacon preached the sermon in the fabrication of which he had been interrupted by his son, and which therefore barely enabled him to turn a quarter of an hour from the giving out of his text.  It was his constant practice to preach for a full twenty minutes.

As Barchester lay on the direct road from Plumstead to Hogglestock, it was thought well that word should be sent to Mr Toogood, desiring him not to come out to Plumstead on the Monday morning.  Major Grantly proposed to call for him at the ‘Dragon’, and to take him from thence to Hogglestock.  ‘You had better take your mother’s horses all through,’ said the archdeacon.  The distance was very nearly twenty miles, and it was felt by both the mother and the son, that the archdeacon must be in a good humour when he made such a proposition as that.  It was not often that the rectory carriage-horses were allowed