“Don’t worry!” he yelled, his face becoming rapidly crimson with his efforts; “I’ll see you all right!  You sha’n’t leave the Manor if I can prevent it!  I’ll speak for you!  Cheer up!  Do you hear!  Che-er up!”

Spruce heard very clearly this time, and smiled.  “Thank you, Passon!  God bless you!  I’m sure you’ll help us, if so be the lady is a hard one—­”

He trusted himself to say no more, but with a brief respectful salutation, put on his cap and turned away.

Left alone, Walden drew a long breath, and wiped his brow.  To make poor old Spruce hear was a powerful muscular exertion.  Nebbie had been so much astonished at the loud pitch of his master’s voice, that he had retired under a sofa in alarm, and only crawled out now as Spruce departed, with small anxious waggings of his tail.  Walden patted the animal’s head and laughed.

“Mind you don’t get deaf in your old age, Nebbie!” he said.  “Phew!  A little more shouting like that and I should be unable to preach to-morrow!”

Still patting the dog’s head, his eyes gradually darkened and his brow became clouded.

“Poor Spruce!” he murmured. “’Help him, if so be the lady is a hard one!’ Already in fear of her!  I expect they have heard something—­ some ill-report—­probably only too correctly founded.  Yet, how it goes against the grain of manhood to realise that any ‘lady’ may be ‘a hard one!’ But, alas!—­what a multitude of ‘hard ones’ there are!  Harder than men, perhaps, if all the truth were known!”

And there was a certain sternness and rooted aversion in him to that dim approaching presence of the unknown heiress of Abbot’s Manor.  He experienced an instinctive dislike of her, and was positively certain that the vague repugnance would deepen into actual antipathy.

“One cannot possibly like everybody,” he argued within himself, in extenuation of what he felt was an unreasonable mental attitude; “’And modern fashionable women are among the most unlikeable of all human creatures.  Any one of them in such a village as this would be absurdly out of place.”

Thus self-persuaded, his mood was a singular mixture of pity and resentment when, in fulfilment of his promise, he walked that afternoon up the winding road which led to the Manor, and avoiding the lodge gates, passed through a rustic turnstile he knew well and so along a path across meadows and through shrubberies to the house.  The path was guarded by a sentinel board marked ’Private.  Trespassers will be prosecuted.’  But in all the years he had lived at St. Rest, he cared nothing for that.  As rector of the parish he had his little privileges.  Nebbie trotted at his heels with the air of a dog accustomed to very familiar surroundings.  The grass on either side was springing up long and green,—­delicate little field flowers were peeping through it here and there, and every now and then there floated upwards the strong sweet incense of the young wild thyme.