The whole family turned out to see him mount and ride off, for Montagu had rushed upstairs to fetch Mr. Wycherly, that he might not miss this entrancing spectacle. The Colonel, as he reached the corner, looked back at the little group standing by the green gate and waved his hat to them: and for just a minute after the landscape seemed a little blurred. "There are more ways than one of making men," he said to a brother officer at mess that night. "It’s the quaintest household, but upon my soul, I’m not at all sure that those two capital little chaps are not rather to be envied." The Colonel was not familiar with the writings of a certain monk of Flanders, or he might have remembered that it is love alone that "maketh light all that is burthensome and equally bears all that is unequal." *CHAPTER XVII* *MR. WYCHERLY GOES INTO SOCIETY* Where is the man who has the power and skill To stem the torrent of a woman’s will? While Mr. Gloag was away upon his holiday a strange minister and his wife came to look after the congregation at Burnhead. The inhabitants regarded them with more or less suspicion, for they came from a big town, and their ways were unaccustomed. Mr. Dewar, the visiting minister, was mild and inoffensive, with no strongly marked characteristic of any sort; but Mrs. Dewar, a large, bustling lady of resolute character and little tact, succeeded during her first week in offending the majority of the leading members of the congregation. Lady Alicia frankly avowed that "she couldn’t endure the woman"; Miss Esperance said nothing; the Misses Moffat were encouraged by Lady Alicia’s plain-speaking to go so far as to remark that Mrs. Dewar was very different from "our late dear Mrs. Gloag," while the village women in confabulation at their respective doors pronounced the newcomer to be "a leddy-buddy," which to the initiated subtly conveyed their opinion that she was not quite a lady. Still, she was eager to do her duty in this small, benighted backwater, and she "visited" with zeal and frequency. Her second visit to Remote was paid at a time when Mr. Wycherly happened to have gone downstairs to ask Miss Esperance a question; and Mrs. Dewar was shown into the parlour before he could escape. And even had such flight been possible, Miss Esperance held up a small, imploring hand as Robina announced the lady’s name, which would have kept Mr. Wycherly at her side to face the wives of twenty ministers. Mrs. Dewar was charmed. She had wanted all along to meet Mr. Wycherly, and she opened the conversation at once by shaking a large kid-gloved forefinger at him, remarking with ponderous jocosity: "I didn’t see you in the church last Sabbath—and how was that?" Mr. Wycherly glanced despairingly at Miss Esperance, and she came to the rescue by remarking: "Mr. Wycherly is not a member of our church, Mrs. Dewar; he is an Episcopalian."