Nouna, to her husband’s great comfort and gladness, was behaving beautifully, and putting new life by her gaiety into the whole household, the younger members of which, in spite of Ella’s intelligence and her sisters’ beauty, were a little wanting in those electric high spirits which, in the routine of a quiet country-house, are as sunshine to the crops. The day after their arrival was Sunday, and the morning church-going had been a fiery ordeal for George, not from religious indifference, but from the misgiving that if Nouna could not keep from smiling in the course of a well-conducted service in a West End church, she would certainly be carried out in convulsions from the Willingham place of worship, where the school children, summer and winter, sniffed through the service in a distressing chorus, while the loud-voiced clerk’s eccentric English rang through the building, drowning the old vicar’s feeble voice; and where the vicar’s wife, a strong-minded lady, whose district-visiting was a sort of assize, had been known to “pull up” her reverend husband publicly from her pew immediately below the pulpit when, as not infrequently happened, he turned over two leaves of his sermon instead of one, and went quietly on as if nothing had happened. “Turned over two leaves? Bless me, so I have!” he would murmur, and rectify his mistake with a tranquil nod. So George had put his wife through a very severe drill before starting, and had strictly forbidden her so much as to sneeze without his permission. She had a narrow escape at the offertory, when one of the churchwardens, with a lively remembrance of the artifices of his own youth, shovelled a penny into the fingers of each of his offspring with one hand, while he presented the plate menacingly with the other. But glancing up at her husband and perceiving a frown of acute terror on his face, she contrived to choke in silence; and the day was gained.