The party were assembled in the garden, where Mrs Sheepshanks's best tea-service was laid out. To say that the conversation was brilliant would be an exaggeration; but it was pleasant and decorous, as conversations at a vicarage ought to be. The two ladies compared notes about the weather and the parish; the curate asked Austin what he had been doing with himself lately; the friend kept silence, even from good words, while the vicar, one of the mildest of his cloth, sat blinking in furtive contemplation of the friend. Certainly it was not a very exhilarating entertainment, and Austin felt that if it went on much longer he should scream. What possible pleasure, he marvelled, could Aunt Charlotte find in such a vapid form of dissipation? Even the garden irritated him, for it was laid out in the silly Early Victorian style, with wriggling paths, and ribbon borders, and shrubs planted meaninglessly here and there about the lawn, and a dreadful piece of sham rockwork in one corner. Of course the vicar's wife thought it quite perfect, and always snubbed Austin in a very lofty way if he ever ventured to express his own views as to how a garden should be fitly ordered. Then his eye happened to fall upon the curate's friend; and he caught the curate's friend in the act of staring at him with a most offensive expression of undisguised contempt. Now, Austin was courteous to everyone; but to anybody he disliked his politeness was simply deadly. Of course he took no notice of the young parson's tacit insolence; he only longed, as fervently as he knew how to long, for an opportunity of being polite to him. And the occasion was soon forthcoming. The conversation growing more general by degrees, a reference was made by the vicar, in passing, to a certain clergyman of profound scholarship and enlightened views, whose recently published book upon the prophet Daniel had been painfully exercising the minds of the editor and readers of the _Church Times_; and it was then that the curate's friend, without moving a muscle of his face, suddenly leaned forward and said, in a rasping voice: "The man's an impostor and a heretic. He ought to be burned. I would gladly walk in the procession, singing the 'Te Deum,' and set fire to the faggots myself."[A] And there was no doubt he meant it. A dead silence fell upon the party. The curate looked horribly annoyed. The ladies exclaimed "Oh!" with a little shudder of dismay. The vicar started, fidgeted, and blinked more nervously than ever. Then Austin, with the most charming manner in the world, broke the spell. "Really!" he exclaimed, turning towards the speaker, a bright smile of interest upon his face. "That's a most delightfully original suggestion. May I ask what religion you belong to?" "What religion!" scowled the curate's friend, astounded at the enquiry.