But Alice warned me how late it was, and I had to go upstairs with her and dress. I cared nothing about my dress. I suffered her to adorn me as she would. But I would wear no ornaments--not _that_ bracelet, nothing but the storied and fatal ring. Like a real star it glittered on my finger--catching the ruddy gleam of the firelight, and shining in the darkened air of the winter twilight. He could not know this story, and I could not tell him of it--it was very strange to be so near, yet so far apart. When I went down to dinner, Mr. Saville was there. It was a relief, yet it piqued me that he should ask any one to come on the first day, though how we could have met alone at table in our sullen estrangement I cannot tell. The Rector was in a very precise clerical dress, his manners were a great deal too fine and careful for a man of breeding, and he seemed to be so much alive to his "position," and so careful to keep it up, that I perceived at once that he must have been raised to this, and that he was not a gentleman either by birth or early training. By some strange logic, I thought of this as an additional offence to me. I did not care to inquire what my husband's motives had been in giving the living to this person. I did not take time to think that probably he had been appointed before Edgar Southcote had conceived his plan for my deception. I thought he had meant to insult me by surrounding me thus with his mean relatives, and depriving me even of the comfort of a suitable neighbor; but I resolved to show him that I was above this mortification, and all the more freely, because I said nothing to him, did I converse with the Rector. He told me of the church which wanted repairs--he said restoration, but I was not acquainted with the ecclesiastical science so fashionable at the time; he told me that his sister had begun to embroider a cloth for the altar--that the very vestments, the sacred vessels for the altar--everything was falling into decay--that the last rector, "a worthy man, he believed, but lamentably lax in his church principles," had whitewashed the interior of the unfortunate church--had barbarously removed the remnants of an ancient screen of carved stonework--had taken up a mutilated brass in the chancel, and laid down a plain flag-stone in its stead; which things, Mr. Saville said pathetically, had so much disgusted the people, that there really had arisen a dissenting place of worship in this formerly orthodox village, and his people were led astray from the true path under his very eyes. Had Mr. Saville told me of an epidemic raging in Cottisbourne, of some deadly disease abroad, and no one bold enough to nurse the patients, I should have been more satisfied--but such things would arise, no doubt; and in the mean time, I should have been glad to have worked with my own hands at the restorations, if these were necessary, though, alas! I was disappointed, and could not feel that