Good-looking, clean-shaven, bullet-headed, his appearance was rather that of a country squire than of a vicar of Christ. An excellent cricketer, hearty in manner, sound in health, he was nevertheless the ideal pastor for the rising generation of youths and maidens, whose muscles were possibly better worth developing than their souls. His wife was the dowdy little woman, who inevitably by a process of natural selection becomes the mate of the muscular Christian. In her first youth she had possessed the undistinguished prettiness common to thousands of English girls whose character, composed of negative qualities, renders them peculiarly acceptable to the average self-assertive man. Now, at forty-five, in spite of her family of children, her figure was as spare and meagre as it had been at twenty, and the gown she wore, a black silk, slightly cut out at the neck, and trimmed with cheap coffee lace, was as dowdy as any of the dresses of her girlhood. Miss Page walked with a charming dignity, her long gown moving over the floor with a soft _frou-frou_ suggestive of silk, and cloudy concealed frills. Her appearance as she bent towards the dowdy little woman, made a contrast almost ludicrous, if it had not also been somewhat pathetic. Mrs. Carfax, innocent of contrasts and all they implied, took her hand in both of hers with an affectionate movement, and in the Vicar’s firm handshake, and in his hearty words of greeting, the same evident liking for their hostess was expressed. “Dr. and Mrs. Dakin,” said Burks, at the door, and again Miss Page’s smile welcomed the new-comers. She particularly liked the tall thin man who entered. Dr. Dakin was a scholar and a dreamer, a man too unpractical by nature adequately to cope with a profession eminently practical. The doctor was only a partial success at Dymfield, where a man of the Vicar’s stamp, genial, a trifle blustering, always cheerful, would have inspired more confidence than the dreamy medical man, who did not treat illness in the high-handed fashion unconsciously expected by his patients. Only his success with one or two really serious cases in the neighbourhood preserved for him some measure of respect, and a general concurrence of opinion, that absent-minded as he appeared before the milder forms of ailment, when it came to graver maladies, Dr. Dakin was presumably to be trusted. To no one was his lack of force and “push” a greater trial than to his wife, whose ambition for her husband had been a London practice, and for herself a smart amusing circle of acquaintances. She was a pretty little woman of six or seven and twenty, with soft dark hair, and a slim figure. Endowed with all the nervous energy her husband lacked, she bore the traces of her discontent about her well-shaped mouth, and in the expression, exasperated and querulous of her brown eyes. They softened into a wholly admiring glance however as they rested on Miss Page.