free from nobility. As she uttered it she gave him her hand, frankly and cordially. Then she left him alone in the starlight, inspired to do and to dare glorious things, and burning to scale the glittering heights of divine enterprise—always supported by the strong soul of Evelyn Methuen.
"She gave him her hand, frankly and cordially."
The obvious sequel of that starry night took place just two months later—it was surely very creditable to both parties that it did not take place much sooner. At length, however, on a similar night of stars, only in the warmer air of November, Miss Methuen found herself in the angle of Follet's arm—heard him whisper to the sweet end what others, mere boys, had but timidly and tentatively begun in the old days at home—found her head lying back upon his shoulder—and breathed, scarcely knowing it, an answer which deserved a finer deliberation than she had given it. You see, it was the first time she had been properly and definitely asked in marriage, the incomparable Miss Methuen.
Then Bishop Methuen made the force of his character unpleasantly apparent.
For so gentle and godly a man, he showed a truly amazing capacity for anger—and anger of a very downright, usual, and Britannic description. Angry, however, as he was was with the culprits, he was still more angry with himself; and—what was not usual, but the very reverse—this made him blame the culprits less and himself more. Putting the pair on parole, he promised to give the matter fair consideration, and he did so in portentous privacy. Then emerging, like the jury, after a mercifully "short delay," he gave what was really, on the whole, a most merciful verdict. Evelyn was to go down to Sydney, and stay with her fine friends there as many months as they would have her—six, if possible. There were to be no letters, no direct communication of any kind. But, if they were both of the same mind when Evelyn came back—and always supposing Follet was as zealous and earnest a worker then as now—then the Bishop would consider the whole matter afresh. They need not look for an unconditional consent even then. The very promise of reconsideration was essentially conditional.
So Miss Methuen went down to Sydney a month before Christmas; and the Bishop, in his human inconsistency, granted her a long interview with Follet on the eve of her departure. Nor did Dr. Methuen's. goodness end then or there he was ridiculously good to Follet from that time forth. The very next day he made the young man fetch his trunks from the Chaplain's house, where hitherto he had lodged, and keep bed and board henceforward at the Lodge. Both were free; and it was the Bishop, of course, who had paid for those trunks and their contents, not as a present (so he said), but as an advance of salary. He would have had us remember that the young fellow was his old schoolfellow's son. The young fellow, however, had amiable characteristics of his own. More than this, he was of real use to the Bishop, being, in spite of his
