Here Mrs. Anerley appeared, her pretty kindly face lit up by some unusual and pleasurable excitement. She was almost out of breath too. "Hubert, do you know what’s going to happen?" "Never having been able, my dear, to calculate the probable line of _your_ actions——" "Be quiet. The Bishop is coming to open the church, when the alterations are complete. And, Mrs. Bexley says, that as their house is so far off, he will lunch with us." "Dear me!" observed Mr. Anerley, "a bishop! I shall become quite respectable. What sort of wine will the exalted creature propose to drink—if a bishop drinks at all?" "There will be several clergymen, you know, and——" "With a bishop in the house, shall I be able to see any lesser lights? I shall allow you women to sit down in the chair he has used, as you all do when the Prince of Wales appears in public. There is a Hindoo custom resembling this—not wholly a religious observance, you know——" Mr. Anerley stopped, perhaps luckily; pretending to have a dreadful struggle with an obstinate stickleback. "Mr. Bexley is charmed with the embroidery that Dove has done for the altar-cloth," continued Mrs. Anerley; "and even poor old Mr. Ribston came hobbling up to me and said ’as it was werry nice indeed; only, ma’am, I should ha’ preferred it without the bits o’ red, which is the mark of the Scarlet Woman. Not as I mean,’ he said, though, ’that either you, ma’am, or Mrs. Bexley, would turn us into Papishes without our knowin’ of it; only there’s some games up as I hear of, and one has to be p’tickler, and not be mixed up wi’ them as is ruinin’ the Church!’" "Very proper, too," said Mr. Anerley, having arranged the stickleback question. "I should think that old Ribston fancied he had hit you and Dove pretty hard there. Would you think Dove was a pupil of the Scarlet Woman, Carry?" "Who is the Scarlet Woman?" said Carry, with her big brown eyes staring. "Mother Redcap," said Mr. Anerley. "A relation of the old woman who lived in a shoe." "Hubert," said Mrs. Anerley, sharply, "you may teach the children stickleback fishing; but you’d better leave other things alone. You may be pulling down more than you can build up again, as Mr. Ribston said about these old pillars in the nave." "Mr. Ribston, my dear, is not a reflective man. He laments the destruction of anything old, not seeing that as we destroy antiquities so the years are making other antiquities. Mamma, box that girl’s ears! she is laughing at me."