“Same to you, Mr. Buggins!” responded the tailor cheerfully, as he turned out into the cool sweet dimness of the hawthorn-hedged lane in which the ‘Mother Huff’ stood—­“I make bold to say that church or no church, Miss Vancourt’s bein’ at her own ’ouse ‘ull be a gain an’ a blessing to the village.”

“Mebbe so,” returned Buggins laconically,—­and closing his door he barred it across for the night, while Dan Ridley, full of the half-poetic, half philosophic thoughts which the subjects of religion and religious worship frequently excite in a more or less untutored rustic mind, trudged slowly homeward.

During these days, Maryllia herself, unconscious of the remarks passed upon her as the lady of the Manor by her village neighbours, had not been idle, nor had she suffered much from depression of spirits, though, socially speaking, she was having what she privately considered in her own mind ‘rather a dull time.’  To begin with, everybody in the neighbourhood that was anybody in the neighbourhood, had called upon her,—­and the antique oaken table in the great hall was littered with a snowy array of variously shaped bits of pasteboard, bearing names small and great,—­names of old county families,—­names of new mushroom gentry,—­names of clergymen and their wives in profusion, and one or two modest cards with the plain ‘Mr.’ of the only young bachelors anywhere near for fifteen miles round.  Nearly every man had a wife—­“Such a pity!” commented Maryllia, when noting the fact—­“One can never ask any of them to dinner without their dragons!”

Most of the callers had paid their ‘duty visits’ at a time of the afternoon when she was always out,—­roaming over her own woods and fields, and ‘taking stock’ as she said, of her own possessions,—­but on one or two occasions she had been caught ‘in,’ and this was the case when Sir Morton Pippitt, accompanied by his daughter Tabitha, Mr. Julian Adderley, and Mr. Marius Longford were announced just at the apt and fitting hour of ‘five-o’clock tea.’  Rising from the chair where she had negligently thrown herself to read for a quiet half hour, she set aside her book, and received those important personages with the careless ease and amiable indifference which was a ‘manner familiar’ to her, and which invariably succeeded in making less graceful persons than she was, feel wretchedly awkward and unhappy about the management of their hands and feet.  With a smiling upward and downward glance, she mastered Sir Morton Pippitt’s ’striking and jovial personality,’—­his stiffly-carried upright form, large lower chest, close-shaven red face, and pleasantly clean white hair,—­“The very picture of a Bone-Melter”—­she thought—­“He looks as if he had been boiled all over himself—­quite a nice well-washed old man,”—­her observant eyes flashed over the attenuated form of Julian Adderley with a sparkle of humour,—­she noticed the careful carelessness of his attire, the artistic ‘set’ of his ruddy locks, the eccentric cut of his trousers, and the, to himself, peculiar knot of his tie.