Next morning it was fine, which mended matters a little. Fine! he said to himself with a little shiver. But he buttoned up his great-coat and went out, bent upon doing his duty. He went to the Rectory first, feeling that at least this would be an oasis in the desert, and found the clergy sitting in two different rooms, over two sermons, which was not a cheerful sight. The Rector was writing his with the calm fluency of thirty years of use and wont; but poor Charley was biting his pen over his manuscript with an incapacity which every successive Sunday seemed to increase rather than diminish. ‘My father, he has got into the way of it,’ the Curate said in a tone which was half admiring, half despairing. Charley did not feel sure that he himself would ever get into the way of it. He had to take the afternoon service when the audience was a very dispiriting one: even Miss Fanny Woodhead did not come in the afternoon, and the organ was played by the schoolmaster, and the hymns were lugubrious beyond description. As the days began to grow longer, and the winter chill to take ever a deeper and deeper hold, the Curate had felt the mournfulness of the position close round him. When Mount was shut up there was nobody to speak to, nobody to refer to, no variety in his life. A house with only two men in it, in the depths of the country, with no near neighbours, and not a very violent strain of work, and no special relief of interesting pursuits, is seldom a cheerful house. When Charley looked up from his heavy studies and saw Heathcote, he almost upset his table in his jump of delighted welcome. Then there succeeded a moment of alarm. ‘Are they all well?--nothing has happened?’ he cried, in sudden panic. ‘Nothing at all,’ Heathcote said, ‘except what concerns myself.’ And it amused the stranger to see how relieved his host was by this assurance, and how cheerfully he drew that other chair to the fire to discuss the business which only concerned so secondary a person. Charley, however, was as sympathetic as heart could desire, and ready to be interested in everything. He understood and applauded the new Squire’s sentiments in respect to his property and his new responsibilities. ‘It is quite true,’ the Curate said with a very grave face, ‘that it makes the greatest difference to everybody. When Mount is shut up the very sky has less light in it,’ said the good fellow, growing poetical. Heathcote had a comprehension of the feeling in his own person which he could not have believed in a little while ago, but he could scarcely help laughing, which was inhuman, at the profound depression in Charley Ashley’s face, and which showed in every line of his large, limp figure. His countenance itself was several inches longer than it had been in brighter days. ‘I am afraid,’ said Heathcote, with a smile, ‘that so much opening of Mount as my arrival will make, will not put very much light into the sky.’