gone to meet his God, and a piece of rock is still shown to innocent
visitors as the place whence some of his enemies, in full armour, were
flung down, many thousand feet, to the waters of the Pol.

Joan had often longed to see the view from the windows of St. James'
Rectory, but she had not known old Dr. Burroughs, the former Rector, a
cross man with gout and rheumatism. She walked up some steps and found the
house the last of three all squeezed together on the edge of the hill. The
Rectory, because it was the last, stood square to all the winds of heaven,
and Joan fancied what it must be in wild wintry weather. Soon she was in
the drawing-room shaking hands with Miss Burnett, who was Mr. Morris'
sister-in-law, and kept house for him.

Miss Burnett was a stout negative woman, whose whole mind was absorbed in
the business of housekeeping, prices of food, wickedness and ingratitude
of servants, maliciousness of shopkeepers and so on. The house, with all
her managing, was neither tidy nor clean, as Joan quickly saw; Miss
Burnett was not, by temperament, methodical, nor had she ever received any
education. Her mind, so far as a perception of the outside world and its
history went, was some way behind that of a Hottentot or a South Sea
Islander. She had, from the day of her birth, been told by every one
around her that she was stupid, and, after a faint struggle, she had
acquiesced in that judgment. She knew that her younger sister, afterwards
Mrs. Morris, was pretty and accomplished, and that she would never be
either of those things. She was not angry nor jealous at this. The note of
her character was acquiescence, and when Agatha had died of pleurisy it
had seemed the natural thing for her to come and keep house for the
distressed widower. If Mr. Morris had since regretted the arrangement he
had, at any rate, never said so.