TEN years later, and Sir Cyril Culverhouse and his wife are still at Bridford, in the good old Queen Anne parsonage, not five minutes’ walk from the lodging where the two nursing sisters came to tend the fever-stricken curate. It is a fine old house, with red brick walls, deep-set windows, oak wainscots, broad staircase, and spacious hall paved with black and white marble, a house which, in the eyes of previous vicars, had been some compensation for the general smokiness and unpleasantness of the town. There is a good old garden too, at the back, which one would hardly expect to find in Bridford--a garden where the apple trees flourish, and the roses struggle into bloom somehow, in spite of the smoke, and where the young Culverhouses learn their lessons in summer, under the direction of Madame Leonard, whom they adore. Every July there is a migration to the Water House, much to the delight of Mrs. Dulcimer, who spoils Beatrix’s children, and believes religiously that she brought about the match between Cyril and Beatrix. ‘Did I not advise you to go to France after her, Cyril?’ demands the old lady, triumphantly, ‘and did I not set my heart upon her being Lady Culverhouse?’ Within the ten years that are gone Cyril has done a great work in Bridford. That town is no longer a hotbed for the generation of vice, drunkenness, and fever. Sanitary reform, being a thing within the scope of human handiwork, has been done by line and rule, while other reforms, more subtle and secret, have been going on quietly, side by side with improvements in drainage and ventilation, water service and cottage building. Large resources have enabled Cyril to do what many a parish priest yearns in vain to accomplish. He has built streets of cottages, a club-house, half a dozen reading-rooms, a cottage hospital ten miles from the town, infant nurseries in every district. Instead of the one hard-worked curate, employed by his predecessor, he has four energetic young fellows going about all day long among the labouring poor, so that there is no corner of the crowded town in which the influence of the church is not daily felt, a protection against wrong, a succour in calamity, an incentive to cleanly living. Once in every year, when the spring flowers are bright in the hedgerows, and the oaks are yellow with their unfolded leaves, Sir Cyril and his wife go with their children to Culverhouse Castle. This is the happiest time of all the year for Beatrix and her children, the holiday of holidays. They know the country round Culverhouse by heart. They ride in the forest, and sail on the bright river, and make yachting excursions to the Wight, and go back to stony-hearted Bridford refreshed and strengthened by these simple natural pleasures. At Culverhouse, Beatrix is adored, as poor Kenrick prophesied she would be--but she is not more honoured or beloved there than by the rough factory hands of Bridford, where her name is a synonym for goodness.