"Hullo? Yes ... yes: you want to know if you may call this evening? The Reverend--oh, yes: you have just come from Scotland? Hold on a minute." She turned to Lady Beltham. "It is Mr. William Hope, and he wants to know if you will see him to-night. He has just come from your place in Scotland." "The dear man!" exclaimed Lady Beltham; "of course he may come," and as Thérèse turned lightly to convey her permission to the clergyman waiting at the other end of the line, she caught a smile on the face of one of the other girls. "What is the joke, Lisbeth?" she enquired. The girl laughed brightly. "I think the worthy parson must have smelt the tea and toast, and wants to make up for the wretched dinner he got in the train." "You are incorrigible," Lady Beltham replied. "Mr. Hope is above such material matters." "Indeed he isn't, Lady Beltham," the girl persisted. "Why, only the other day he told Thérèse that all food deserved respect and esteem directly a blessing had been asked upon it, and that a badly cooked steak was a kind of sacrilege." "A badly cooked pheasant," Thérèse corrected her. "You are both wicked little slanderers," Lady Beltham protested gently, "and don't know the blessing a good appetite is. You do, Susannah, don't you?" Susannah, a pretty Irish girl, looked up from a letter she was reading, and blushed. "Oh, Lady Beltham, I've been ever so much less hungry since Harry's ship sailed." "I don't quite see the connection," Lady Beltham answered. "Love is good nourishment for the soul, but not for the body. However, a good appetite is nothing to be ashamed of, and you ought to keep your roses for your future husband, and qualify in every way to be an excellent mother of a family." "With lots and lots of children," Lisbeth went on wickedly: "seven or eight daughters at the very least, all of whom will marry nice young clergymen when their time comes and----" She stopped speaking and the light chatter died away as a footman entered and announced the Reverend William Hope, who followed him immediately into the room, an elderly man with a full, clean-shaven face and a comfortable portliness of figure. Lady Beltham offered him a cordial hand. "I am delighted you are back," she said. "Will you have a cup of tea with us?" The parson made a general bow to the girls gathered about the table. "I got a wretched dinner in the train," he began, but Lisbeth interrupted him. "Don't you think this tea smells delicious?" she asked. The parson put out his hand to take the cup she offered to him, and bowed and smiled. "Precisely what I was going to observe, Miss Lisbeth." Thérèse and Susannah turned away to hide their amusement, and Lady Beltham adroitly changed the subject. She moved towards her writing-table. "Mr. Hope must have much to tell me, girls, and it is getting late. I must get to business. Did you have a good journey?"