Sunday came--a peaceful summer Sabbath--a day of sunshine and azure sky, and Ida, whose anxiety about Vernon had kept her away from her parish church for the last three Sundays, was able to set out upon her walk to the village with a heart quite at rest on the boy's account. Even the mother could find no excuse for staying at home with her boy, and felt that conscience and society alike required that she should assist at the service of her parish church. Vernie was convalescent, able to sit up in his bed, propped with pillows, and eat hot-house grapes, and turn over the leaves of endless volumes of _Punch_, laughing with his hearty childish laugh at Leech's jokes and the curious garments of a departed era. 'How could men wear such trousers? and how could women wear such bonnets?' he asked his mother, wonderingly contemplating fashionable youth as represented by the great pen-and-ink humourist. 'I don't know why we shouldn't wear them, Vernie,' said his mother, with rather an offended air; 'those spoon bonnets were very becoming. I wore one the day your pa first saw me.' 'And hoops under your gown like that?' said Vernie, pointing; 'and those funny little boots? What a guy you must have looked!' When a boy has come to this pass he may fairly be left with servants for a couple of hours; so Lady Palliser put on her stateliest mourning--her thick corded silk, flounced with crape and her Mary Stuart bonnet, and went across the park, and up hill and down hill, for it was a country of hills and hollows--to the parish church of Wimperfield, a very ancient edifice, with massive columnar piers, Norman groined roof, and walls enriched by a grand array of memorial tablets, setting forth the honours and virtues of those dead and gone landowners whose bones were mouldering in the vaults below the square oaken pews in which the living worshipped. In the chancel there was the usual stately monument to some magnate of the middle ages, who was represented kneeling by his wife's side, with a graduated row of sons and daughters kneeling behind them, as if the whole family had died and petrified simultaneously, in the act of pious worship.