Gregory threw up his hand.

“How dare you!” he whispered.

Again Mr. Barter’s humorous under-lip shot out.

“I dare a good deal more than that, Mr. Vigil,” he said, “as you will find; and I say this to you—­stop this divorce, or I’ll stop it myself!”

Gregory turned to the window.  When he came back he was outwardly calm.

“You have been guilty of indelicacy,” he said.  “Continue in your delusion, think what you like, do what you like.  The matter will go on.  Good-evening, sir.”

And turning on his heel, he left the room.

Mr. Barter stepped forward.  The words, “You have been guilty of indelicacy,” whirled round his brain till every blood vessel in his face and neck was swollen to bursting, and with a hoarse sound like that of an animal in pain he pursued Gregory to the door.  It was shut in his face.  And since on taking Orders he had abandoned for ever the use of bad language, he was very near an apoplectic fit.  Suddenly he became aware that Mrs. Pendyce was looking at him from the conservatory door.  Her face was painfully white, her eyebrows lifted, and before that look Mr. Barter recovered a measure of self-possession.

“Is anything the matter, Mr. Barter?”

The Rector smiled grimly.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said.  “I must ask you to excuse me, that’s all.  I’ve a parish matter to attend to.”

When he found himself in the drive, the feeling of vertigo and suffocation passed, but left him unrelieved.  He had, in fact, happened on one of those psychological moments which enable a man’s true nature to show itself.  Accustomed to say of himself bluffly, “Yes, yes; I’ve a hot temper, soon over,” he had never, owing to the autocracy of his position, had a chance of knowing the tenacity of his soul.  So accustomed and so able for many years to vent displeasure at once, he did not himself know the wealth of his old English spirit, did not know of what an ugly grip he was capable.  He did not even know it at this minute, conscious only of a sort of black wonder at this monstrous conduct to a man in his position, doing his simple duty.  The more he reflected, the more intolerable did it seem that a woman like this Mrs. Bellew should have the impudence to invoke the law of the land in her favour a woman who was no better than a common baggage—­a woman he had seen kissing George Pendyce.  To have suggested to Mr. Barter that there was something pathetic in this black wonder of his, pathetic in the spectacle of his little soul delivering its little judgments, stumbling its little way along with such blind certainty under the huge heavens, amongst millions of organisms as important as itself, would have astounded him; and with every step he took the blacker became his wonder, the more fixed his determination to permit no such abuse of morality, no such disregard of Hussell Barter.