'But not for you,' said his wife.

'Yes for me. If the boy includes us old folks in his festivity, it
will be as good as a week's port wine. You doubt, my sweet Enid. Has
not our long honeymoon at Vale Leston helped us all this time?' Her
name was Mary, but having once declared her to be a woman made of the
same stuff as Enid, he had made it his pet title for her.

Mrs. Underwood's thoughts went far away into the long ago of Vale
Leston. She could hardly believe that nine years only had passed
since that seven-years' honeymoon. She was a woman of the fewest
possible words, and her husband generally answered her face instead
of her voice.

Vale Leston had promised to be an ample provision when Edward
Underwood had resigned his fellowship to marry the Rector's niece and
adopted daughter, his own distant cousin, with the assurance of being
presented to the living hereafter, and acting in the meantime as
curate. It was a family living, always held conjointly with a
tolerably good estate, enough to qualify the owner for the dangerous
position of 'squarson,' as no doubt many a clerical Underwood had
been ever since their branch had grown out from the stem of the elder
line, which had now disappeared. These comfortable quarters had
seemed a matter of certainty, until the uncle died suddenly and with
a flaw in his will, so that the undesirable nephew and heir-at-law
whom he had desired to exclude, a rich dissipated man, son to a
brother older than the father of the favourite niece, had stepped in,
and differing in toto from Edward Underwood, had made his own son
take orders for the sake of the living, and it had been the effort of
the young wife ever since not to disobey her husband by showing that