"Will it!" was the sarcastically emphatic retort. "Not if Cattacomb and the girls can help it. It's neither cold nor heat that will stop them!"
"Well, I am not sure about the law, Miss Diana. I don't know that St. Henry is, either."
"Look here, Sir Karl. If the law is not strong enough to put down these places, there's another remedy. Let all the clergy who officiate at them be upwards of fifty years old and married. It would soon be proved whether, or not, the girls go for the benefit of their souls."
Sir Karl burst into a laugh.
"It is these off-shoots of semi-religious places, started up here and there by men of vanity, some of whom, I venture to say it, are not licensed clergymen, that bring the shame and the scandal upon the true church," concluded Miss Diana. "There: don't let us talk of it further. Have you come from the train?"
"Yes. I had to run up to London for an hour or two to-day."
"Then I daresay you are tired. Give my love to your wife," added Miss Diana, as she wished Sir Karl good evening and turned into St. Jerome's again to watch over her niece Jemima.
Sir Karl strode onwards. He had just come home from his interview with Mr. Burtenshaw. Miss Diana Moore and her sentiments had served to divert his mind for a moment from his own troubles, but they were soon all too present again. The hum of the voices and sound of the footsteps came back to him from the crowd, pursuing its busy way to the village: he was glad to keep on his own solitary course and lose its echo.
Some one else, who had come out of St. Jerome's but who could not be said properly to pertain to the crowd, had kept on the solitary road--and that was Mr. Strange. He knew the others would take the direct way to the village and Mrs. Jinks's, and perhaps that was the reason why he did not. But there was no accounting for what Mr. Strange did: and one thing was certain--he had been in the habit lately of loitering in that solitary road a good deal after dusk had fallen, smoking his cigar there between whiles.
Sir Karl went on. He had nearly reached the Maze, though he was on the opposite side, when at a bend of the road there suddenly turned upon him a man with a cigar in his mouth, the end of it glowing like an ember. The smoker would have turned his head away again, and passed on, but Sir Karl stopped. He had recognized him: and his mind had been made up on the way from London, to speak to this man.