‘Mr. Harry’s father did first suggest—­’ said Peterborough, but her quickly-altered features caused him to draw in his breath, as she had done after one short laugh.

My grandfather turned a round side-eye on me, hard as a cock’s.

Janet immediately started topics to fill Peterborough’s mouth:  the weather, the walk to church, the probable preacher.  ‘And, grandada,’ said she to the squire, who was muttering ominously with a grim under-jaw, ‘His private chaplain!’ and for this once would not hear her, ‘Grandada, I shall drive you over to see papa this afternoon.’  She talked as if nothing had gone wrong.  Peterborough, criminal red, attacked a jam-pot for a diversion.  ‘Such sweets are rare indeed on the Continent,’ he observed to my aunt Dorothy.  ‘Our homemade dainties are matchless.’

‘Private chaplain!’ the squire growled again.

‘It’s you that preach this afternoon,’ Janet said to Peterborough.  ’Do you give us an extempore sermon?’

’You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little trimming to do.’

Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him.  ’You’ll give me five minutes before you’re out of the house, please.  D’ ye smoke on Sundays?’

‘Not on Sundays, sir,’ said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as to signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of Sunday smoking.

’See you don’t set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain’s tricks.  I spied you puffing behind one t’ other day.  There,’ the squire dispersed Peterborough’s unnecessary air of abstruse recollection, ’don’t look as though you were trying to hit on a pin’s head in a bushel of oats.  Don’t set my ricks on fire—­that ‘s all.’

‘Mr. Peterborough,’ my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his sitting-room.

’ Oh, I thank you!’ I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to the squire’s mercy.

Janet followed me out.  ’It was my fault, Harry.  You won’t blame him, I know.  But will he fib?  I don’t think he’s capable of it, and I’m sure he can’t run and double.  Grandada will have him fast before a minute is over.’

I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire’s promise that Peterborough should have his living,—­so much it seemed possible to save.

She flew back, and in Peterborough’s momentary absence, did her work.  Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and much archaic English.  The squire’s power of vituperation was notorious:  he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps in cogency of epithet.  Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing that he had never heard such language,—­never dreamed of it.  And to find himself the object of it!—­and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously defend himself!  The pain to him was in the conscience,—­which