After that Mary Ellen's mind became an incoherent blur. A stately limousine glided up; Mary Ellen was handed in by a footman and Excalibur was stuffed in after her in installments. The grand gentleman entered by the opposite door and sat down beside her; but Mary Ellen was much too dazed to converse with him. The arrival of the equipage in Pilgrim Street was the greatest moment of Mary Ellen's life. Meantime upstairs in the first-floor front the curate, lying in his uncomfortable flock bed, was saying:-- "If you really mean it, sir--" "I do mean it. If those two children had been burned to death unnoticed I should never have forgiven myself, and the public would never have forgiven the company." "Well, sir, since you say that, you--well, you could do me a service. Could you possibly use your influence to get me a billet--I'm not asking for an incumbency; any old curacy would do--a billet I could marry on?" He flushed scarlet. "I--we have been waiting a long time now." There was a long silence, and the curate wondered whether he had been too mercenary in his request. Then Lord Caversham asked:-- "What are you getting at present?" "A hundred and twenty a year." This was about two thirds of the salary Lord Caversham paid his chauffeur. He asked another question in his curious, abrupt staccato manner:-- "How much do you want?" "We could make both ends meet on two hundred; but another fifty would enable me to make her a lot more comfortable," said the curate wistfully. The great man surveyed him silently--wonderingly, too, if the curate had known. Presently he asked: "Afraid of hard work?" "No work is hard to a man with a wife and a home of his own," replied the curate with simple fervor. Lord Caversham smiled grimly. He had more homes of his own than he could conveniently live in, and he had been married three times; but even he found work hard now and then. "I wonder!" he said. "Well, good-afternoon. I should like to be introduced to your fiancee some day." IX A TRAMP opened the rectory gate and shambled up the neat gravel walk toward the house. Taking a short cut through the shrubbery he emerged suddenly on a little lawn. On the lawn a lady was sitting in a basket chair beside a perambulator, the occupant of which was slumbering peacefully. A small but intensely capable nursemaid, prone on the grass in a curvilinear attitude, was acting as tunnel to a young gentleman of three who was impersonating a locomotive. The tramp approached the group and asked huskily for alms. He was a burly and unpleasant specimen of his class--a class all too numerous on the outskirts of the great industrial parish of Smeltingborough. The lady in the basket chair looked up. "The rector is out," she said. "If you go into the town you will find him at the Church Hall and he will investigate your case." "Oh, the rector is out, is he?" repeated the tramp in tones of distinct satisfaction. "Yes," said Eileen. The tramp advanced another pace.