way."

"I suppose I shall have to look for another curate," said the Rector.
But this was said in private to his wife.

"I don't see that at all," said Mrs. Clavering. "With many men it would
be so; but I think you will find that he will take an answer, and that
there will be an end of it."

Fanny, perhaps, had a right to be indignant, for certainly Mr. Saul had
given her no fair warning of his intention. Mary had for some months
been intent rather on Mr. Fielding's church matters than on those going
on in her own parish, and therefore there had been nothing singular in
the fact that Mr. Saul had said more on such matters to Fanny than to
her sister. Fanny was eager and active, and as Mr. Saul was very eager
and very active, it was natural that they should have had some interests
in common. But there had been no private walkings, and no talkings that
could properly be called private. There was a certain book which Fanny
kept, containing the names of all the poor people in the parish, to
which Mr. Saul had access equally with herself; but its contents were of
a most prosaic nature, and when she had sat over it in the rectory
drawing-room, with Mr. Saul by her side, striving to extract more than
twelve pennies out of charity shillings, she had never thought that it
would lead to a declaration of love.

He had never called her Fanny in his life--not up to the moment when she
declined the honor of becoming Mrs. Saul. The offer itself was made in
this wise. She had been at the house of old Widow Tubb, half-way between
Cumberly Green and the little village of Clavering, striving to make
that rheumatic old woman believe that she had not been cheated by a