title="[56]"/> an officious severity, was sensibly relaxed on these days and Excalibur found himself at liberty to range abroad amid the heath and through the coppices, engaged in a pastime that he imagined was hunting.

One hot afternoon, wandering into a clearing, he encountered a hare. The hare, which was suffering from extreme panic, owing to a terrifying noise behind it,—the blast of the newest and most vulgar motor horn, to be precise,—was bolting right across the clearing. After the manner of hares where objects directly in front of them are concerned, the fugitive entirely failed to perceive Excalibur and, indeed, ran right underneath him on its way to cover. Excalibur was so unstrung by this adventure that he ran back to where he had left Eileen and the curate.

They were sitting side by side on the grass and the curate was holding Eileen's hand.

Excalibur advanced on them thankfully and indicated by an ingratiating smile that a friendly remark or other recognition of his presence would be gratefully received; but neither took the slightest notice of him. They continued to gaze straight before them in a mournful and abstracted fashion. They looked not so much at Excalibur as through him. First the hare, then Eileen and the curate! Excalibur began to fear that he had become invisible, or at least transparent. Greatly agitated he drifted away into a neighboring plantation full of young pheasants. Here he encountered a keeper, who was able to dissipate his gloomy suspicions for him without any difficulty whatsoever. But Eileen and the curate sat on.

"A hundred pounds a year!" repeated the curate. "A pass degree and no influence! I can't preach and I have no money of my own. Dearest, I ought never to have told you."

"Told me what?" inquired Eileen softly. She knew quite well; but she was a woman, and a woman can never let well enough alone.

The curate, turning to Eileen, delivered himself of a statement of three words. Eileen's reply was a softly whispered Tu quoque!

"It had to happen, dear," she added cheerfully, for she did not share the curate's burden of responsibility in the matter. "If you had not told me we should have been miserable separately. Now that you have told me, we can be miserable together. And when two people who—who—" She hesitated.

The curate supplied the relative sentence. Eileen nodded her head in acknowledgment.

"Yes; who are—like you and me—are miserable together, they are happy! See?"

"I see," said the curate gravely. "Yes, you are right there; but we can't go on living on a diet of joint misery. We shall have to face the future. What are we going to do about it?"

Then Eileen spoke up boldly for the first time.

"Gerald," she said, "we shall simply have to manage on a hundred a year."

But the curate shook his head.

"Dearest, I should be an utter cad if I allowed you to do such a thing," he said. "A hundred a year is less than two pounds a week!"

"A lot of people live on less than two pounds a week," Eileen pointed out longingly.

"Yes; I know. If we could rent a three-shilling cottage and I could go about with a spotted handkerchief round my neck, and you could scrub the doorsteps coram populo, we might be very comfortable; but the clergy belong to the black-coated class, and people in the lower ranks of the black-coated class are the poorest people in the whole wide world. They have to spend money on luxuries—collars and charwomen, and so on—which a workingman can spend entirely on necessities. It wouldn't merely mean no pretty dresses and a lot of hard work for you, Eileen. It would mean starvation! Believe me—I know! Some of my friends have tried it—and I know!"

"What happened to them?" asked Eileen fearfully.

"They all had to come down in the end—some soon, some late, but all in time—to taking parish relief."

"Parish relief?"

"Yes; not official, regulation, rate-aided charity, but the infinitely more humiliating charity of their well-to-do neighbors—quiet checks, second-hand dresses, and things like that. No, little girl; you and I are too proud—too proud of the cloth—for that. We will never give a handle to the people who are always waiting to have a fling at the improvident clergy—not if it breaks our hearts, we won't!"

"You are quite right, dear," said Eileen quietly. "We must wait."

Then the curate said the most difficult thing he had said yet:—

"I shall have to go away from here."

Eileen's hand turned cold in his.

"Why?" she whispered; but she knew.

"Because if we wait here we shall wait forever. The last curate in Much Moreham—what happened to him?"

"He died."

"Yes—at fifty-five; and he had been here for thirty years. Preferment does not come in sleepy villages. I must go back to London."

"The East End?"

"East or south or north—it doesn't signify. Anywhere but west. In the east and south and north there is always work to be done—hard work. And if a parson has no money and no brains and no influence, and can only work—run clothing clubs and soup kitchens, and reclaim drunkards—London is the place for him. So off I go to London, my beloved, to lay the foundations of Paradise for you and me—for you and me!"

There was a long silence. Then the pair rose to their feet and smiled on each other extremely cheerfully, because each suspected the other—rightly—of low spirits.

"Shall we tell people?" asked the curate.

Eileen thought, and shook her head.

"No," she said; "nicer not. It will make a splendid secret."

"Just between us two, eh?" said the curate, kindling at the thought.

"Just between us two," agreed Eileen. And the curate kissed her very solemnly. A secret is a comfortable thing to lovers, especially when they are young and about to be lonely.

At this moment a leonine head, supported on a lumbering and ill-balanced body, was thrust in between them. It was Excalibur, taking sanctuary with the Church from the vengeance of the Law.

"We might tell Scally, I think," said Eileen.

"Rather!" assented the curate. "He introduced us."

So Eileen communicated the great news to Excalibur.

"You do approve, dear—don't you?" she said.

Excalibur, instinctively realizing that this was an occasion when liberties might be taken, stood up on his hind legs and placed his forepaws on his mistress's shoulders. The curate supported them both.

"And you will use your influence to get us a living wage from somewhere—won't you, old man?" added the curate.

Excalibur tried to lick both their faces at once—and succeeded.

VI

So the curate went away, but not to London. He was sent instead to a great manufacturing town in the north, where the work was equally hard, and where Anglican and Roman and Salvationist fought grimly side by side against the powers of drink and disease and crime. During these days, which ultimately rolled into years, the curate lost his boyish freshness and his unfortunate tendency to put on flesh. He grew thin and lathy; and, though his smile was as ready and as magnetic as ever, he seldom laughed.

He never failed, however, to write a cheerful letter to Eileen every Monday morning. He was getting a hundred and twenty