Priscilla's face had not escaped Thorburn's notice. He had keen eyes, and he saw everything. He saw Priscilla with wonder. Women, as a rule, did not flock to his church. They said they found his sermons cold. Men, and some of them none of the best, chiefly made up his audiences. It was not hard anywhere to observe Priscilla's snow-drop face in her little black bonnet, with her eager, beseeching eyes. After a while Mr. Thorburn began to feel their mesmeric influence, as Dr. Sunbury had done ever since she was fifteen. He began to watch for her, to preach at her, to feel that she understood him--a very comfortable thing for a public speaker. Of course he knew who Miss Priscilla Mildmay was--"Very nice, but not the equal of the elder Misses Mildmay," he usually heard--and sometimes they had met at Dr. Sunbury's. As Mr. Thorburn was naturally a silent man, and Priscilla lacked courage in a drawing-room, they scarcely exchanged half a dozen words. It came about, though, as these things will, that in the course of his parish work he came upon Priscilla--Priscilla teaching a class of ragged boys their lessons, after having taught the most stylish young ladies in West Harrowby the most elegant branches of a polite education. Some way, all the restraint they had felt in Dr. Sunbury's drawing-room melted away in the little bare school room. There Priscilla reigned supreme, calmly confident under Mr. Thorburn's searching gaze. She had a peculiar knack of teaching. Her gentle, "Now, please, boys," had the same effect as Mr. Thorburn's stern, "See, you fellows, behave yourselves." Mr. Thorburn watched with admiration the tact with which she managed her somewhat unruly crowd. Of course all this teaching did not go on with the unqualified approbation of the Misses Mildmay. Priscilla showed a phenomenal determination about it, and being upheld by Dr. Sunbury, who in some way always encouraged her vagaries, the Misses Mildmay, although they might look coldly on it, could not forbid it. It did not take much to violently excite West Harrowby; and therefore when the Harrowby Union-Palladium published one morning, with a big display head that covered half the first page of the paper, the burning of the Northern Lunatic Asylum, a certain circumstance connected therewith gave West Harrowby something to talk about for a week. Five inmates of the women's ward were missing, and among them was Mrs. Eleanor Thorburn. Five bodies, charred beyond recognition, were found in the ruins. Some days after a notice appeared in the obituary column of the Union-Palladium: "Suddenly, on the 17th of February, Mrs. Eleanor Thorburn, wife of the Reverend Edmund Thorburn, of East Harrowby." That was all.