first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and
audacious priest from the office and benefice he had no right to hold,
and had so criminally misused. If he submitted and went quietly, well and
good. But of course he would do nothing of the kind. There was a
lamentable amount of disloyalty and infidelity in the diocese, and he
would be supported. An ugly struggle was inevitable--a struggle for the
honour of Christ and his Church. It would go down to the roots of things
and was not to be settled or smoothed over by a false and superficial
courtesy. The days of friendship, of ordinary social intercourse, were
over. Barron did not intend to receive the Rector again within his own
doors, intimate as they had been at one time; and it was awkward and
undesirable that they should be meeting in other people's drawing-rooms.

All these feelings were running through his mind while aloud he was
laboriously giving Mrs. Flaxman his reasons for thinking a parish nurse
unnecessary in Upcote Minor. When he came to the end of them, Meynell
looked at him with amused exasperation.

"Well, all I know is that in the last case of typhoid we had here--a poor
lad on Reynolds's farm--his mother got him up every day while she made
his bed, and fed him--whatever we could say--on suet dumpling and cheese.
He died, of course--what could he do? And as for the pneumonia patients,
I believe they mostly eat their poultices--I can't make out what else
they do with them--unless I stay and see them put on. Ah, well, never
mind. I shall have to get Mrs. Flaxman alone, and see what can be done.
Now tell me"--he turned again with alacrity to Manvers--"what's that new
German book you quote about Butler? Some uncommonly fine things in it!
That bit about the Sermons--admirable!"

He bent forward, his hands on his knees, staring at Manvers. Yet