“I wonder you don’t set up for a parson, Aunt Mary Ann! This is as good as a sermon.”
“Then carry the sermon in your memory through life, Valentine. Our doings, whether they be good or ill, bring back their fruits. In some wonderful manner that we cannot understand, events are always shaping onwards their own true ends, their appointed destiny, and working out the will of Heaven.”
That’s all. And the Squire seemed to take a leaf out of Mrs. Cramp’s book. For ever so long afterwards, he would tell us to read a lesson from the history of the Chandlers, and to remember that none can deal unjustly in the sight of God without having to account for it sooner or later.
VERENA FONTAINE’S REBELLION.
I.
You have been at Timberdale Rectory two or three times before; an old-fashioned, red-brick, irregularly-built house, the ivy clustering on its front walls. It had not much beauty to boast of, but was as comfortable a dwelling-place as any in Worcestershire. The well-stocked kitchen-garden, filled with plain fruit-trees and beds of vegetables, stretched out beyond the little lawn behind it; the small garden in front, with its sweet and homely flowers, opened to the pasture-field that lay between the house and the church.
Timberdale Rectory basked to-day in the morning sun. It shone upon Grace, the Rector’s wife, as she sat in the bow-window of their usual sitting-room, making a child’s frock. Having no little ones of her own to work for—and sometimes Timberdale thought it was that fact that made the Rector show himself so crusty to the world in general—she had time, and to spare, to sew for the poor young starvelings in her husband’s parish.
“Here he comes at last!” exclaimed Grace.