‘Because I have looked up to him all my life as a being in a black silk gown who preached long sermons and would do something awful to me if I laughed in church. I looked upon him as the very embodiment of the Church, don’t you know, and should hardly have believed that he wanted breakfast and dinner, and wore out his clothes and boots like other men. When he came to call I used to run away and hide myself. I had an idea that he would scold me if I came in his way—take me to task for not being a christian, or ask me to repeat last Sunday’s Gospel. And to think that he should be my uncle. How curiously things come round in this life!’ ‘I hope you will not cease to respect him, and that you will learn to love him,’ said Aunt Rhoda severely. ‘Learn to love him! Do you think he would like it?’ asked Daphne doubtfully. ‘He would like you to behave to him as a niece ought, Daphne. Marmaduke considers my relations his own.’ ‘I’m sure it is very good of him,’ said Daphne, ‘but I should think it must come a little difficult after having known us so long in quite another capacity.’ The Rector’s wife gave her niece a look of half interrogation, half disapproval. She did not know how much malice might lurk under the girl’s seeming innocence. She and Daphne had never got on very well together in the old days, when Miss Lawford was the mistress of South Hill, and the arbiter of her nieces’ lives. A year ago, and Rhoda Lawford, at three-and-forty, was still Rhoda Lawford; and any idea of matrimonial promotion which she had once cherished might fairly be supposed to have expired in the cold shade of a neighbourhood where there were very few marriageable men. But Rhoda had begun life as a girl with considerable pretensions. She had never asserted herself or been put forward by her friends as a beauty. The material for that kind of reputation was wanting. But she had been admired and praised for her style, her manner, her complexion, her hair, her hands, her feet, her waist, her shoulders. She was a young lady with good points, and had been admired for her points. People had talked of her as the elegant Miss Lawford: and as, happily, elegance is a quality which time need not impair, Rhoda had gone on being elegant for five-and-twenty years. The waist and shoulders, the hands and feet, had never been out of training for a quarter of a century. More ephemeral charms had bloomed and faded; and many a fair friend of Rhoda’s who had triumphed in the insolence of conscious beauty was now a _passée_ matron, of whom her acquaintance said pityingly, ‘You have no idea how pretty that woman was fifteen years ago;’ but the elegant Miss Lawford’s attractions were unimpaired, and the elegant Miss Lawford had not yet surrendered the hope of winning a prize in the matrimonial lottery.