see how she might best bring proper clerical influence to bear upon her own recreant fox-hunting parson, it occurred to her that she might use Mr. Crawley in the matter. Mr. Crawley would certainly be on her side as far as opinion went, and would have no fear of expressing his opinion to his brother clergyman. So she sent for Mr. Crawley.
In appearance he was the very opposite to Mark Robarts. He was a lean, slim, meagre man, with shoulders slightly curved, and pale, lank, long locks of ragged hair; his forehead was high, but his face was narrow; his small gray eyes were deeply sunken in his head, his nose was well formed, his lips thin and his mouth expressive. Nobody could look at him without seeing that there was a purpose and a meaning in his countenance. He always wore, in summer and winter, a long dusky gray coat, which buttoned close up to his neck, and descended almost to his heels. He was full six feet high, but, being so slight in build, he looked as though he were taller.
He came at once at Lady Lufton's bidding, putting himself into the gig beside the servant, to whom he spoke no single word during the journey. And the man, looking into his face, was struck with taciturnity. Now Mark Robarts would have talked with him the whole way from Hogglestock to Framley Court, discoursing partly as to horses and land, but partly also as to higher things.
And then Lady Lufton opened her mind and told her griefs to Mr. Crawley, urging, however, through the whole length of her narrative, that Mr. Robarts was an excellent parish clergyman—"just such a clergyman in his church as I would wish him to be," she explained, with the view of saving herself from an expression of any of Mr. Crawley's special ideas as to church teaching, and of confining him to the one subject-matter in hand; "but he got this living so young, Mr. Crawley, that he is hardly quite as steady as I could wish him to be. It has been as much my fault as his own in placing him in such a position so early in life."
"I think it has," said Mr. Crawley, who might, perhaps, be a little sore on such a subject.
"Quite so—quite so," continued her ladyship, swallowing down with a gulp a certain sense of anger. "But that is done now, and is past cure. That Mr. Robarts will become a credit to his profession I do not doubt, for his heart
