Miss Frederica, with a guilty remembrance of Lady Isabel's enquiries, had established her weeding apparatus at a bed near the yew-hedge. She heard the voices raised in discussion, and, catching words here and there, felt that if these were the topics that occupied her charges, Isabel need not have inflicted upon her the abominable nuisance of poking in her nose where it was not wanted. Thus did Miss Coppinger summarise the duties of a chaperon; but it must be remembered that she had never been broken to the work, and in any case she had been out of harness for four years. The luncheon gong sounded to her across the Michaelmas daisies, and the tall scarlet lobelias, and the gorgeous dahlias of the September garden; she gathered her tools together and projected a shriek in the direction of the yew hedge. "Children! Lunch!" As, dizzy with stooping, she slowly reared herself to be full height, she saw a black, moving blur on the drive beyond the garden. She rubbed her eyes; the blur defined itself as a man in priestly black. Not Mr. Fetherston, a she had first believed, but Father Sweeny. "A wolf in sheep's clothing!" thought Frederica, using as was her wont, the well-worn phrase with guileless zest. She held that although it might not, primarily, have been intended to describe the Roman Catholic Priesthood, its application in a later age was obvious. With a cautious eye on the wolf, she approached the yew hedge. "Larry! Father Sweeny's at the hall door. You must ask him in to lunch!" To herself she thought: "He's Larry's affair, thank goodness! And I'll see that my young man does his duty!" When Frederica spoke of, or to, her nephew, as "my young man," it was generally in connection with what she felt to be his duty, and felt also that it was her duty to see that his was not shirked. Father Tim Sweeny, at lunch, at the house of his chief parishioner, was a very different being from the damaged and ferocious bull in hospital. Conscious of his priestly dignity and of the need of supporting it, but shaken by the minor stresses of the situation, the senseless multiplicity of forks and spoons, the bewildering restrictions by which he felt himself to be webbed about, hampered, mastered, Father Tim was as a wild bull in a net, and was even pathetic in his unavailing efforts to prove himself equal to his surroundings. He cleared his throat at intervals, with an authority that seemed to prelude something more epoch-making than an assent to one of Frederica's industrious platitudes; he snuffled and fidgeted, eating scarcely at all, and repelling the reverential assiduities of the servants with shattering abruptness.