The visitations of this curate, who also conducted the one weekly service in the village school, was a little arrangement between those fast friends, Sir Wilton Gleed and Canon Wilders, who would have been interested to learn the way in which their delegate improved the rare occasion of a funeral. For marriages and baptisms the Long Stow folk had taken to walking across the heath to Linkworth. Early in the second year there came a visitor whom Robert Carlton knew at a glance, though he had never before seen him in the flesh. This was a person with the appearance of a rather dissipated sporting man, who tooled tandem through the village, and pulled up at the ruins in broad daylight. The thing was thus a scandal from the first moment of its occurrence, and the cockaded groom was beset by horrified rustics before his master's red neck had disappeared among the low and ragged walls. Carlton had withdrawn into the invisible seclusion of the west end, where he was nervously scraping at the nearest stone when the visitor appeared, only to stop short with a whistle. "I thought this was the church the parson was building with his own hands?" "So it is, my lord." "And you are what he calls his own hands!" "No, I am he." The visitor stared. "You the parson?" "I know I don't look like one," admitted Carlton, glancing from his ruined hands to the shabby clothes in which he worked; "nor can I fairly consider myself one at present. Yet I am still the only rector of this parish, and it was I who wrote to your lordship about the stone. Yours are the only quarries in this part of the country. The stone I am now using came from them. But it is just finished, and unless you will let me have some more I may have to stop; otherwise I believe that I could build up to the roof, in time, without assistance." "And why should you?" "My church was burnt down through my own--fault." "I know all about that," said his lordship. "What I ask is, why should you insist upon building it up single-handed?" "I didn't insist originally," sighed Carlton. "It is a very long story." The earl regarded him with a pair of very penetrating little eyes; he was an ugly man with an ugly reputation, but one of those who take as little trouble to conceal their worst characteristics as to display their best. "To be quite frank with you," said he, "I happen to know something of your story; and I consider it a jolly sight more discreditable to others than to you. That's _my_ opinion, and I don't care who knows it. So you are really and literally doing this thing with your own two hands?" "Literally--as yet." "And who looks after you?" "Oh, no one comes near me; but I am bound to say that I have learnt to look pretty well after myself. I have found it absolutely necessary for my work." "Cookin' for yourself, and all that sort of thing?" "Cooking and even killing when necessary." "Is the boycott as wide and as bad as all that?" "It is no worse than I deserve."