In olden days, the owners of Rathlands had been accustomed to encourage their humble neighbours in their attempts at window gardening, and offered prizes for the best flowers, as well as for vegetables and fruit. Mr. Mitchelson had returned too late for this little show to be held at the usual time, but it was arranged that on the fifteenth of September there was to be an exhibition of the kind. The local gentry would take part in it. The show would be revived, and another year they hoped it would be made a greater success. Whatever might be lacking in the articles exhibited on this occasion would be made up, it was hoped, by certain festivities which were to accompany it. A special entertainment, a kind of house-warming, was to take place, and guests of every degree to be hospitably entertained in accordance with their several positions. "And it is good of him to do all this," said Miss Chatterton to everybody. "Mr. Mitchelson is so delightfully ready to profit by, and act upon, a hint from a neighbour." If Rathbury folk had not known Miss Chatterton, they might have been deluded into thinking that to some judicious hint of hers the approaching festivities were all owing, and that she was at the helm of Rathlands' affairs, turning its master wheresoever she listed. Whatever they might believe, there is no doubt she thought she possessed great influence, because Mr. Mitchelson Was too polite to run away when she had actually compelled his attention in the first instance; but, like other Rathbury folk, he soon acquired preternatural sharp-sightedness, and when Miss Chatterton appeared in the distance, he disappeared, with all possible rapidity, in the opposite direction. And, like everybody else in Rathbury, Mr. Mitchelson felt not a little thankful that, however sharp-sighted the elderly spinster might be in some respects, Nature had rendered her physically unable to see far beyond the tip of her very aquiline and aristocratic nose. Few people, however, judged that Miss Chatterton had any malice in her composition. She was generally regarded as being a little too much inclined to pry into her neighbours' affairs, and to repeat what concerned them with unnecessary freedom; a little too ready to lecture the poor, even while relieving them; and forgetful that a cottage and a palace are equally the castle of the English man and woman abiding therein. Rathbury folk had not yet gone far below the surface of Miss Chatterton's feelings, and, perhaps, of all who knew her, Elsie Manning had formed the truest estimate of her character. There is a sort of instinct in us which rouses a feeling of suspicion, dread, or antagonism towards certain individuals. Is it not a species of armour, Divinely bestowed, to enable us to protect ourselves against attacks of a sort too subtle to be met by ordinary means?