"Ask him to come out here," said Horatia. Going back to her chair she passed her handkerchief quickly over her eyes, and snatched a small garment and needle and thread from her basket.
And Tristram, looking unusually elated, almost boyish, and also rather hot, approached her over the grass pulling something from a wallet.
"I'm too dusty to come near you," he said, coming nevertheless. "This is the sixth parsonage I've descended on this afternoon. I think I may say without vanity that 'the dun deer's hide on fleeter foot was never tied'—except that the foot in question belongs to a livery stable." He almost threw into her lap a small bundle of pamphlets, and crossed the lawn to get another chair.
Horatia looked at his back with a curious expression, but when he turned her gaze was on the uppermost Tract.
"Fellow-Labourers," began the first of its four small pages, "I am but one of yourselves—a Presbyter...."
"Newman's," said Tristram, sitting down beside her. "We're going to make a row in the world at last!"
(2)
For the next six weeks or so, while various persons, clerical and lay, of the same opinions as Tristram Hungerford were riding about the country to the same end, or packing up for distribution large parcels of the new Tracts for the Times by Residents in Oxford, while the clergy thus bombarded were recovering from the shock of being told by "A Presbyter" of their apostolical descent, while Hurrell Froude, ordered to Barbados in the vain pursuit of health, was showing, as usual, his daring spirit by urging Newman to break an impossible alliance with the conservative High Church—while all these portents were taking place Horatia de la Roche-Guyon was paying a number of visits. Though sorry to leave the neighbourhood of Oxford just as the fiery cross was going round, she did not altogether regret the change of scene, for she was beginning to wonder whither these pleasant conversations with Tristram were leading, and she thought that absence might enable her to gain a clearer view of the situation.
By the end of October she found herself staying with her friend Emilia Strangways (whom once she had declared she would not go to see again for seven years) at the house in Devonshire to which her husband had succeeded on the death of an uncle. Only one more visit remained, a short sojourn with the Puseys at Oxford on her way home. Maurice, who had accompanied her on her first visits nearer Compton, had not been brought so far, but, with or without her son, Horatia was now able to bear an honoured part in the continual and detailed conversations on the uprearing of children (Emilia being by now the parent of a boy and girl) and threw herself with zest into discussions on the dangers of teething and the proper thickness of infantile winter clothing, feeling sure, with something of her old insight, that Mrs. Strangways commented to her husband upon "the improvement in dear Horatia." On the wheels of these domestic conferences the visit passed away, uneventful until its last day, when Henry Strangways descended to breakfast with a set face, and a saucer upon which reposed a minute fleck of something flabby and green.
"In my shaving water, Emilia," he said in a tense voice. "I have questioned the servants most closely. They are positive that it did not occur in the kitchen. So that means it has all begun again!"