He was immensely respected and admired by the poor people of the parish (none of whom were included in his small and well-to-do congregation), the fact that he was what is known as “old stock,” giving him a prestige among the poorer Roman Catholics, that they would have denied to St. Peter.  He shared with Major Talbot-Lowry the position of consultant in feuds, and relieving officer in distress, and, being rich, liberal, easily bored, and not particularly sympathetic to affliction, he was accustomed to stanch the flow of tears and talk alike, with a form of solace that rarely failed to meet the case, and was always acceptable.  With Miss Coppinger, he felt, regretfully, that five shillings could in no way be brought to bear upon her problem, and with an effort he withdrew his mind from a new hinge that he thought of fitting to a garden-gate, and applied it to Larry.

“How old is the boy now?  Sixteen last October?  He doesn’t look as much—­you’ll see he’ll outgrow all that nonsense of Nationalism!  Send him to Oxford as soon as you can.  He’ll soon get hold of some other tomfoolery there, and forget this.  Seven devils worse than the first, in fact!”

The Reverend Charles laughed, wheezily, and began, automatically, to fill a pipe, an indication of a change of mental outlook.

“Worse?” cried Miss Frederica, ardently; “no indeed, Mr. Fetherston!  Better!  Far better! Anything is preferable to this—­this Second-rate Sedition!”

When Frederica perorated, and this remark partook of the nature of peroration, it was as though she took a header into deep water.  By the time she had again risen to the surface of her emotions, the Reverend Charles Fetherston had returned to the hinge of the garden-gate, and Miss Coppinger, knowing her man, made no attempt to recall him.  She had a very special regard for her rector, of a complex sort that is not quite easy to define.  There was veneration in it, the veneration that was inculcated in her youth for the clergy; there was the compassion that many capable and self-confident women bestow upon any man to whom Providence has denied a feminine protector; there was a regretful pity for his shortcomings—­(but half-acknowledged, even to herself)—­as a Minister of the Word, counterbalanced by respect for his worldly wisdom; above all, there was the deep, peculiar interest that was excited in her by any clergyman, merely in virtue of his office, a person whose trade it was to occupy himself with the art and practice of religion, which was a subject that had, quite apart from its spiritual side, the same appeal for her that the art and practice of the theatre has for many others. (It is hard to imagine any simile that would have shocked Frederica more than this; in all her years of strenuous, straightforward life, she had never, as she would have said, set foot in a theatre.)