IN WHICH MISS ARMINSTER VERIFIES THE PROVERB.
The Bishop was pacing his garden. He was far from happy. It is true he had not been worsted in his encounter with his sister. There had been a drawn battle, and he had retired with dignity, conceding nothing but that he would ask Miss Arminster to come to his study at noon and explain her position. He could not believe the charges against the charming Violet, but nevertheless he felt decidedly uncomfortable: for even if she cleared herself, she was still married, and the palace lacked a mistress.
It was easy to say that Miss Matilda should be deposed, but who should take her place? Not another man's wife, certainly. For the first time in all these years, his Lordship realised how lonely he had been. He should have remarried long before, and indeed even so unworldly a person as he knew that more than one young lady in Blanford would have viewed with complacency the prospect of becoming Mrs. Bishop.
A young wife, however, even as attractive as the fair Violet, was not, he told himself, exactly what he wanted. He had tried a period of double rule in which his sister was the power behind the throne, and it was infinitely worse than the present régime. No; if he took another helpmate, she must be a person of strong will, some one who could hold her own against all comers, some one who should have an inexhaustible fund of sympathy for his work, some one whose appreciation of the exalted position of the Bishop of Blanford should be so great as to blind her, occasionally at least, to those minor faults to which, Scripture tells us, all flesh is heir.
It was at just this point in his meditations that his Lordship, turning sharply round the corner of a large gooseberry-bush, came suddenly upon Mrs. Mackintosh. Their surprise was mutual, for the good lady had evidently been gardening, and was suffering from the rigour of the game.
"That head man of yours is a duffer," she said sharply, pointing a very earthy trowel at the unconscious figure of the gardener, who was busy in the middle distance digging potatoes. "A man," she continued, "who calls a plain, every-day squash a vegetable marrow isn't fit to run a well-ordered truck-patch; though it's no more than might be expected in a country where they sell bread by the yard, and flour by the gallon. And what, I should like to know, is a 'punnet'?"
"I'm afraid, madam, I must confess my ignorance," replied the Bishop.
"I thought as much," she retorted. "And yet they put you in command of a diocese. Your gardener said to me this morning: 'I'll pick a "punnet" of strawberries to-day.' 'You'll do nothing of the kind,' I told him. 'Pick them in a Christian basket, or not at all.'"
His Lordship laughed.
"It's some sort of measure, I imagine," he remarked.