The ordinary dinner-hour at Huddersfield was one o’clock. At the club or hostelries at which Beaumont was fain to dine, if he wished for ought more than the chop or steak beyond which the culinary skill of his landlady seldom adventured, one o’clock was the sacred hour of dinner, and at that time the manufacturers, merchants, and professional men took their substantial mid-day meal. To be sure, there were occasional dinner-parties at private houses of the more pretentious of the _nouveaux riches_ of the neighbourhood, fixed for seven o’clock, at which the gentlemen were expected to appear arrayed in the correct glories of evening-dress, but Edward had always complied with an ill-grace to this sacrifice to middle-class snobbishness. He thought it ridiculous that people who, on three hundred and sixty days of the year, sat down at noon with healthy appetites to their Yorkshire pudding and roast beef, with pickled cabbage and apple-pie and cheese, and a glass of Burton to wash it down, should, on festive days, don a garb they were not used to, and in which they felt ill at ease, dine off kickshaws they did not care for, drink wines of which they hardly knew the names, and which they did not honestly like—all because, instead of dining, they were giving a dinner. However, he had brought a dress suit with him in—_utrurmque sortem paratus_, as he reflected with satisfaction. The library at the Vicarage was a capacious room, furnished in oak, and did service also as a smoke-room. It was a very choice Havana that the Archdeacon handed to his guest, as the latter joined him in the pleasant room, and stood to admire the prospect from the long French window giving upon the trim lawn. “I’m afraid you won’t find many books here much to your taste; but my daughter will perhaps be able to find you some literature of a lighter sort.” “I confess, Archdeacon, to a weakness for fiction. The mistress of my choice is, of course, law; but I flirt with divinity, or, should I say, apologetics, and I am afraid to think how many novels I read in the year.” “Ah! well, _dulce est desipere_. Unhappily I neglect my books too much in these latter days. And for some time now I have been unable to concentrate my mind even on my sermons, I suppose it is a just judgment on me. I preach to my poor flock on the sin of covetousness and the blessedness of contentment, and yet I have myself, though blessed by Providence with stores above my every need, have not known to be content, and have sought to add to my sufficiency. I say _mea culpa_ with all my heart, and I promise you, Mr. Beaumont, if you can help me out of this coil, never again to entangle myself with concerns I do not understand, and which have brought me hitherto only anxious days and sleepless nights.”