The old lady made no answer, but got up and took the girl's arm, and left the seat very quietly. She got down the gallery stairs, and halted at the old window on the landing, and sate there a little, ghastly and still mute. The cold air circulating upward from the porch revived her. "I am better, child," said she, faintly. "Thank Heaven," said the girl, whose terror at her state proved how intensely agitated the old lady must have been. Mrs. Wrattles, the sextoness, emerging at that moment with repeated courtesies, and whispered condolence and inquiries, Lady Alice, with a stiff condescension, prayed her to call her woman, Mason, to her. So Lady Alice, leaning slenderly on Mason's stout arm, insisted that Beatrix should return and sit out the service; and she herself, for the first time within the memory of man, returned from Wardlock church on foot, instead of in her coach. Beatrix waited until the congregation had nearly disgorged itself and dispersed, before making her solitary descent. When she came down, without a chaperon, at the close of the rector's discourse, the floured footman in livery, with his gold-headed cane, stood as usual at the coach door only to receive her, and convey the order to the coachman, "home." The churchyard gate, as is usual, I believe, in old places of that kind, opens at the south side, and the road to Wardlock manor leads along the churchyard wall and round the corner of it at a sharp angle just at the point where the clumsy old stone mausoleum or vault of the Deverell family overlooks the road, with its worn pilasters and beetle-browed cornice. Now that was a Sunday of wonders. It had witnessed Lady Alice's pedestrian return from church, an act of humiliation, almost of penance, such as the memory of Wardlock could furnish no parallel to; and now it was to see another portent, for her ladyship's own gray horses, fat and tranquil beasts, who had pulled her to and from church for I know not how many years, under the ministration of the careful coachman, with exemplary sedateness, on this abnormal Sabbath took fright at a musical performance of two boys, one playing the Jew's harp and the other drumming tambourine-wise on his hat, and _suadente diabolo_ and so forth, set off at a gallop, to the terror of all concerned, toward home. Making the sharp turn of the road, where the tomb of the Deverells overhangs it from the churchyard, the near-gray came down, and his off-neighbour reared and plunged frightfully. The young lady did not scream, but, very much terrified, she made voluble inquiries of the air and hedges from the window, while the purple coachman pulled hard from the box, and spoke comfortably to his horses, and the footman, standing out of reach of danger, talked also in his own vein.