basketmaker. Natural, indeed, must be his wish for secrecy; pretty story
it would be for Humberston, its future rector learning how to preach a
sermon from an old basketmaker! But he had a nobler and more imperious
motive for discretion: his honour was engaged to it. Waife exacted a
promise that he would regard the intercourse between them as strictly
private and confidential.

"It is for my sake I ask this," said Waife, frankly, "though I might say
it was for yours;" the Oxonian promised, and was bound. Fortunately Lady
Montfort quitted the great house the very day after George had first
encountered the basketmaker, and writing word that she should not return
to it for some weeks, George was at liberty to avail himself of her
lord's general invitation to make use of Montfort Court as his lodgings
when in the neighbourhood; which the proprieties of the world would not
have allowed him to do while Lady Montfort was there without either host
or female guests. Accordingly, he took up his abode in a corner of the
vast palace, and was easily enabled, when he pleased, to traverse
unobserved the solitudes of the park, gain the waterside, or stroll
thence through the thick copse leading to Waife's cottage, which bordered
the park pales, solitary, sequestered, beyond sight of the neighbouring
village. The great house all to himself, George was brought in contact
with no one to whom, in unguarded moments, he could even have let out a
hint of his new acquaintance, except the clergyman of the parish, a
worthy man, who lived in strict retirement upon a scanty stipend. For
the Marquess was the lay impropriator; the living was therefore but a
very poor vicarage, below the acceptance of a Vipont or a Vipont's
tutor, sure to go to a worthy man forced to live in strict retirement.
George saw too little of this clergyman, either to let out secrets or
pick up information. From him, however, George did incidentally learn
that Waife had some months previously visited the village, and proposed