He stood looking at them with melancholy on his face. "Why, Edward," cried his sister, Philippa, as her motor stopped beside him, "how doleful you look! Get into the car and come out into the country for a ride. Let the parish teas look after themselves for today."
Tom, Philippa's husband, was driving his own car—he was rich enough to be able to—and seated with Philippa in the car was an unknown person, as prettily dressed as Philippa herself. To the rector she was presently introduced as Miss Catherine Something—he didn't hear the rest of it. Nor did he need to. It was quite plain that her surname, whatever it was, was a very temporary and transitory affair.
So they sped rapidly out of the City and away out into the country, mile after mile, through cool, crisp air, and among woods with the touch of autumn bright already upon them, and with blue sky and great still clouds white overhead. And the afternoon was so beautiful and so bright that as they went along there was no talk about religion at all! nor was there any mention of Mothers' Auxiliaries, or Girls' Friendly Societies, nor any discussion of the poor. It was too glorious a day. But they spoke instead of the new dances, and whether they had come to stay, and of such sensible topics as that. Then presently, as they went on still further, Philippa leaned forwards and talked to Tom over his shoulder and reminded him that this was the very road to Castel Casteggio, and asked him if he remembered coming up it with her to join the Newberry's ever so long ago. Whatever it was that Tom answered it is not recorded, but it is certain that it took so long in the saying that the Reverend Edward talked in tete-a-tete with Catherine for fifteen measured miles, and was unaware that it was more than five minutes. Among other things he said, and she agreed—or she said and he agreed—that for the new dances it was necessary to have always one and the same partner, and to keep that partner all the time. And somehow simple sentiments of that sort, when said direct into a pair of listening blue eyes behind a purple motor veil, acquire an infinite significance.
Then, not much after that, say three or four minutes, they were all of a sudden back in town again, running along Plutoria Avenue, and to the rector's surprise the motor was stopping outside the manse, and Catherine was saying, "Oh, thank you ever so much, Philippa; it was just heavenly!" which showed that the afternoon had had its religious features after all. "What!" said the rector's sister, as they moved off again, "didn't you know? That's Catherine Dumfarthing!"
When the Rev. Fareforth Furlong arrived home at the rectory he spent an hour or so in the deepest of deep thought in an armchair in his study. Nor was it any ordinary parish problem that he was revolving in his mind. He was trying to think out some means by which his sister Juliana might be induced to commit the sin of calling on the daughter of a presbyterian minister.
The thing had to be represented as in some fashion or other an act of self-denial, a form of mortification of the flesh. Otherwise he knew Juliana would never do it. But to call on Miss Catherine Dumfarthing seemed to him such an altogether delightful and unspeakably blissful process that he hardly knew how to approach the topic. So when Juliana presently came home the rector could find no better way of introducing the subject than by putting it on the ground of Philippa's marriage to Miss Dumfarthing's father's trustee's nephew.
"Juliana," he said, "don't you think that perhaps, on account of Philippa and Tom, you ought—or at least it might be best for you to call on Miss Dumfarthing?"
Juliana turned to her brother as he laid aside her bonnet and her black gloves.
"I've just been there this afternoon," she said.