“_Oi’ll_ clear her cottage,” he added darkly, and it seemed to Bundock that the parson had succeeded only in patching up the feud. But what was to be expected of the canting crew, the postman inquired. The new Chipstone curate had called on his father, and Bundock related with a chuckle how the bed-ridden old boy had patronizingly regretted that, being on his back, he could do nothing to help his visitor. “He sent him away with a bed-flea in his ear,” gloated Bundock. Mr. Joshua Mawhood recalled a bigger flea in the same clerical ear. The hapless curate had offered him a ticket for a lecture on “Economy.” “Come with me Bradmarsh way,” the rat-catcher had retorted, “and Oi’ll show you Mrs. Pennymole’s cottage, and if you’ll show me how she can bring up her nine childer on eleven shillings a week, Oi’ll eat your shovel-hat.” Bundock, unable to find a still larger flea, fell back on hypothesis. “If I’d been a Churchman and a chap in a white choker came to mine,” he said, “I’d tell him to mind his own business, and I dare say he’d be insulted, though I’d be giving him splendid advice. You know where the door is, I’d say, for you didn’t come in by the chimney. Now walk out, or else——!” And carried away by his own drama, Bundock administered a hearty kick to the apparently still-lingering phantom. Needless to say, Mr. Fallow exercised none of this imagined prying into Jinny’s affairs. Like his pew-opener, whose long caped coat with the official red border found now a fresh justification, he was only too glad of her uninvited attendance, and the considerable accretion she brought to his congregation. Her presence freshened up for himself his old sermons: for her sake he even put in new Latin quotations. But Jinny enjoyed more the three musicians in the gallery—’cellist, flautist, and bassoonist—whose black frock-coats and trousers made them as important in quality as they were in quantity, and when after they had played a few bars the congregation sang: “_Awake my soul, and with the sun_ _Thy daily stage of duty run,_” Jinny felt herself rapt far indeed from her daily stage of duty. Even the pew-opener shuffling about in his list slippers to poke up the stove or a small boy, or to snuff the guttering tallow candles on dark mornings, could not bring her to earth.