“Well, I am glad to see you laugh, even if it is at my expense,” said Hetty. “What are you two quarreling about?” inquired Jennie, who had put her baby to sleep and now entered the parlor. “As to which is the best preacher, your mother of myself,” answered the curate. “Oh, mamma! out and out! I have often wished I could hear her in the pulpit!” laughed Jennie. “That settles it! Hetty, you have gained the point!” said the Rev. James, as he strolled out of the parlor into his study. His wife’s words had not been without their effect. He was just now surrounded with such bright blessings, living in such an atmosphere of love, peace, health, comfort, and happiness that nothing could be added to their blessedness; yet their very perfection troubled him, lest they should not be permanent. He could not enjoy this blessed time, because next month or next year might bring a change which might be for the worse. Why, what base thanklessness and faithlessness was this! While he “preached to others” he was himself “a castaway.” But he resolved that he would reform all this. He would take no anxious care for the future. He would do the best he could and leave the rest to the Lord. From that day he presented a more cheerful aspect to his family. The leading parishioners began to call on his daughter. Partly from hearsay and partly from inference, they had got a mixed opinion about the status of the young woman. She was the wife—so they Lad heard—of one Capt. Kightly Montgomery, son of the late General the Honorable Arthur Montgomery, and grandson of the late and nephew of the present Earl of Engelwing; that the captain was now, of course, with his regiment in India, and that his young wife had come home with her infant on a long visit to her father, because the climate of India was so fatal to young children of European parentage. Under these mingled impressions of truth and error they called to pay their respects to their pastor’s daughter. From the village there came Mrs. and the Misses Leach, the doctor’s wife and daughters; Mrs. Drum, the lawyer’s mother, and the Misses Lesmore, the draper’s sisters, and several widows and maidens living on their annuities. From the country came Lady Nutt, of Nuttwood, the widow of a civil engineer who had been knighted for some special merit by the queen; the three Misses Frobisher, “ladies of a certain age,” co-heiresses of Frobisher Frowns, a queer and gloomy mansion on the moor, which stood against a bank crowned with dark evergreen trees that bent over the roof of the house, like towering brows on a human face—thence I suppose the quaint if not forbidding name. These were all. Others of the county gentry belonging to that neighborhood were absentees. Jennie as well as her mother was much pleased with the hearty, homely, cordial manners of these Yorkshire country people. But the better she liked the more she dreaded them!