Mortland Royal was a rich living, worth, with the great and lesser tythe, some eight or nine hundred a year. The rector, the Hon. Leonard O'Donnell, was the son of an Irish peer who owned considerable property in Norfolk and in whose gift the living was. Mr. O'Donnell was a man of many activities, a bachelor, much in request in London, and very little inclined to waste his energies in a small country village. He was a courtly, polished little man who found his true _milieu_ among people of his own class, and neither understood, nor particularly cared to understand, a peasant community. His work, as he said, lay elsewhere, and he did a great deal of good in his own way with considerable satisfaction to himself. Possessed of some private means, Mortland Royal supplemented his income and provided him with a convenient _pied à terre_ where he could retire in odd moments to a fashionable county in which a number of great people came to shoot in the season. The rectory itself was a large old-fashioned house with some pretensions to be called a country mansion, and for convenience sake, Mr. Medley was housed there, and became de facto, if not de jure, the rector of the village. Mr. O'Donnell gave his colleague two hundred a year, house room, and an absolutely free hand. The two men liked one another, if they had not much in common, and the arrangement was mutually convenient. Medley was a pious priest of the old-fashioned type. His flock claimed all the interest of his life. He had certain fixed and comely habits belonging to his type and generation. He read his Horace still and took a glass of port at dinner. Something of a scholar, he occasionally reviewed some new edition of a Latin classic for the _Spectator_, though he was without literary ambitions. He had a little money of his own, and three times a year he dined at the high table in Merton College Hall, where every one was very pleased to see him. A vanishing type to-day, but admirably suited to his environment. The right man in the right place. The real rector was regarded with awe and some pride in the village. His name was often in the newspapers. He was an eloquent speaker upon Temperance questions at important congresses. He went to garden parties at Windsor and theatricals at Sandringham. When he was in residence and preached in his own church, it was fuller than at other times. He was a draw. His distinguished face and high, well-bred voice were a pleasant variation of monotony. And the theology which had made him so welcome in Mayfair was not without a pleasing titillation for even the rustic mind. Mr. O'Donnel was convinced, and preached melodiously, the theory that the Divine Mercy extends to all human beings. He asserted that, in the event, all people would enter Paradise--unless, indeed, there was no Paradise, which in his heart of hearts he thought exceedingly likely.