home to "take charge," as they said, of
her father's house.

Maud also came back to Shipley vicarage,
having "completed her education"; in
other words, having learned all that they
could teach her at the Danecester school.

For two years, Veronica reigned mistress
of her father's household. Perhaps the
burthen of the song, Veronica being
nineteen, had only so far changed as to run
thus: "Now that I am grown up, I won't
stay at Shipley"?

We shall see.

CHAPTER IV. AN ACCIDENT.

SOME subtle influence—a sight, or sound,
or smell—touched the long-drawn links of
association in the vicar's mind as he stood
at his own door one February afternoon,
and made him remember that dreary
autumn day on which he had first seen
Shipley.

His thought flashed back along the past
years, as the electric spark thrills through
a long chain of clasping hands.

"Poor Stella!" he said, half aloud.

Mr. Levincourt was apt to spend a good
deal of his available store of compassion on
himself. But there is no more effectual
check to the indulgence of our own failings
and weaknesses, than the exaggerated
manifestation of the same defect in another.
That which in us is only a reasonable
and well-grounded dissatisfaction, becomes
mere selfish unjustifiable repining in our
neighbours.

So long as his wife lived, therefore, Mr.
Levincourt was shamed by her loud and
frivolous complainings from expressing one-
half the distaste he really felt for his life
at Shipley-in-the-Wold, although he had
secretly deemed his wife far less entitled to
pity than he was, whose qualities of mind
and refinement of education enabled him to
understand much better what he had lost
in being thus buried alive at Shipley.

But Stella Levincourt, born Barletti,
slept in St. Gildas's graveyard, and a white
tablet glimmering out of the gloomiest
corner in the dark little church bore an
inscription to her memory. And since her
death he had occasionally felt much
retrospective sympathy with his wife.

"Poor Stella!" he said again; and, shutting
the door behind him, he walked down
the gravel pathway, passed through the
iron wicket, crossed the paddock, and
proceeded thus through St. Gildas's churchyard
towards the village.

It was not a day to loiter in. It had
snowed a good deal the previous night, but
since ten o'clock that morning, a steady
thaw had set in. The roads were deep in
mud, whose chill penetrated the stoutest
shoe-leather. An ice-cold dew seemed to
exude from everything one touched, and the
sky spread a lead-coloured canopy from
horizon to zenith.

Mr. Levincourt made for the school-house.
This was a bare lath-and-plaster building,
erected at the cost of the late vicar to serve
as a Sunday-school. The present incumbent,
while adhering to its founder's first
intention, had found an additional use for
the whitewashed school-room. It served,
namely, as a place for the choir of St. Gildas
to practise in.

Before Mr. Levincourt's day, the music
at divine service in St. Gildas consisted
solely of portions of Tate and Brady, bawled,
or snuffled out in monotonous dissonance.
Mr. Levincourt's refined and critical ear
suffered many a shock from his congregation's
strenuously uplifted voices. He
resolved to amend the singing, and flattered
himself that he would find support and
encouragement in this undertaking. But
folks were as loath to be amended in Shipley,
as in most other places: and Mr.
Levincourt's first attempts to teach them
harmony, resulted in discord dire.

By degrees he lowered his pretensions.
He had begun with high-flown ideas of
foreign mass-music adapted to English
words. Then, some of the simpler compositions
of our English cathedral writers were
attempted. At length he resolved to be
satisfied with Martin Luther's Hymn, and
Adeste Fideles, sung in parts. Things
began to go better. The younger generation,
trained to some knowledge of music,
became capable of succeeding in such
modest attempts as these. Nor was it,
indeed, from the younger generation that
the great difficulties had arisen.

Farmer Meggitt, and Farmer Sack, and
other middle-aged farmers and graziers,
could not be got to understand that it
behoved them to be passive listeners to the
music during service.

"What do ye mean then, by 'Let us sing
to the praise——–'? Let us," Farmer Meggitt
said oos, "sing! Not 'let the little lads and
wenches in the organ-loft, sing to the
praise'! Parson Levincourt's on a wrong
tack altogether. And as to his new-
fangled tunes—why they're Popish: that's
what they are: and I don't care who hears
me say so!"

The implied slight to Farmer Meggitt's