warmly, his long hatchet face breaking into animation.

"Lucky for you!" said the Rector, walking away. "When she cuts in, she's
worth a regiment of doctors. Good-day!"

The speaker passed on through the gate of the Rectory, pausing as he did
so with a rueful look at the iron gate itself, which was off its hinges
and sorely in want of a coat of new paint.

"Disgraceful!" he said to himself; "must have a go at it to-morrow. And
at the garden, too," he added, looking round him. "Never saw such a
wilderness!"

[Illustration: The Rectory]

He was advancing toward a small gabled house of an Early Victorian type,
built about 1840 by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners on the site of an
old clergy house, of which all traces had been ruthlessly effaced. The
front garden lying before it was a tangle of old and for the most part
ugly trees; elms from which heavy, decayed branches had recently fallen;
acacias choked by the ivy which had overgrown them; and a crowded
thicket of thorns and hazels, mingled with three or four large and
vigorous though very ancient yews, which seemed to have drunk up for
themselves all that life from the soil which should have gone to maintain
the ragged or sickly shrubbery. The trees also had gradually encroached
upon the house, and darkened all the windows on the porch side. On a
summer afternoon, the deep shade they made was welcome enough; but on a
rainy day the Rector's front-garden, with its coarse grass, its few
straggling rose-bushes, and its pushing throng of half-dead or funereal
trees, shed a dank and dripping gloom upon the visitor approaching his