The barrow was wheeled to Miss Blythe's door, and Miss Blythe in the open air, without waiting to remove bonnet, gloves, or mantle, began to turn over the leaves of the books, taking one systematically after the other, and racing through them as if her life depended on the task. Rapidly as she went to work at this singular task, it occupied an hour, and when it was all over the prim, starched old lady actually sat down upon her own door-step with lax hands, and crushed her best new bonnet against the door-post in a very abandonment of lassitude and fatigue. “Done?” said Joseph, who had been sitting on the handle of the wheelbarrow, occasionally nodding and dozing in the pleasant sunlight. Miss Blythe arose languidly and gave him the promised sixpence. “You'm a wonner to read, you be, mum,” he said, as he pocketed the coin. “I niver seed none on 'em goo at sich a pace as that. Sometimes my lord 'll look at one side of a noospaper for a hour together. I've sin him do it.” Receiving no reply, he spat upon his hands again, and started on the final course of his journey. Rachel closed the gate behind him, and walked automatically into her own sitting-room. “There is no fool like an old fool,” she said, mournfully. Then, with sudden fire, “I have known the man to be a villain these six-and-twenty years. Why should I doubt it now?” And then, her starched dignity and her anger alike deserting her, she fell into a chair and cried so long and so heartily that at last, worn out with her grief, she fell asleep. CHAPTER IX. The church-bells made a pleasant music in Hey-don Hay on Sunday mornings, and were naturally at their best upon a summer Sunday, when the sunshine had thrown itself broadly down to sleep about the tranquil fields. Heydon Hay was undisturbed by the presence of a single conventicle in opposition to the parish church, and the leisurely figures in the fields and lanes and in the village street were all bent one way. In fine weather the worshippers were for the most part a little in advance of time, and thereby found opportunity to gather in knots about the lich-gate, or between it and the porch, where they exchanged observations on secular affairs with a tone and manner dimly tempered by the presence of the church.