Asquith’s young wife did not enter; and even the sermons, which were all read to her before they were preached, were the better for Mary; for the curate was quick to note when her attention failed, when her eyelids drooped, as they did sometimes, over her eyes. She was far too loyal, and too much an enthusiast, you may be sure, ever to allow in words that those prelections were less than perfect; but Mr. Asquith was clever enough to see that sometimes her attention flagged. Once or twice, before the first year was out, Mary nodded while she listened--a delinquency which she denied almost furiously, with the wrath of a dove; and which was easily explained by the fact that she was at that moment “not very strong:” but which nevertheless Mr. Asquith, as he laughed and kissed her and said, “That was too much for you, Mary,” took to heart. “Too much for me!” she cried; “if you mean far finer and higher than anything I could reach by myself, of course you are quite right, Henry; but only in that sense,” the tears coming into her eyes in the indignation of her protest. The curate did not insist, nor try to prove to her that she had indeed dozed, which some men would have done. He was too delicate and tender for any such brutal ways of proving himself in the right; but, all the same, he laid that involuntary criticism to heart, to the great advantage of his preaching. Thus they did each other mutual good. And what a beautiful life these two lived! I know a little pair in a little town, with not much more money than the Asquiths, and connections much less important, and surroundings much less pretty--a pair who have only a little house in a street, with unlovely houses of the poor about them, instead of comely cottages, who do very much the same, all honour to them! The Asquiths flung themselves upon that parish, and took the charge of it with a rush, out of the calm elderly hands which had for years managed it so easily. I do not undertake to say that they did no harm, or that they were always wise; nobody is that I have ever come in contact with: but if there is any finer thing in the world than to maintain a brave struggle with all that is evil on account of others, on account of the poor, who so often cannot help themselves, I don’t know what it is. These two laid siege to all the strongholds of ill in the village--and evil, or the Evil One if you please to put it so, has many such strongholds--with all the energies of their being. They fought against wickedness, against disorder, against disease, against waste, and dirt, and drink; against the coarse habits and unlovely speech of the little rural place. They made a chivalrous attempt to turn all those rustics into ladies and gentlemen--into what is better, Christian men and women, into good and pure and thoughtful persons, considering not only their latter end, as the parson had always bidden them to do, but also their present living and all their habits and ways. The curate had