fill a pipe, an indication of a change of mental outlook.

"Worse?" cried Miss Frederica, ardently; "no indeed, Mr. Fetherston!
Better! Far better! _Any_thing 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.)

Frederica had been born at Coppinger's Court, and she had passed her
childhood there, but her youth had been spent in Dublin, in the hot