Mrs. Judd's two daughters had left the institution long ago, and were away in domestic service. Now, Ephraim, like a great many other people, had two totally opposite sides to his character. To the majority of people he was merely an ordinary, painstaking young clerk, but there were others who knew him under quite a different aspect. The fact was that Ephraim was a prominent member of a certain numerically small sect of Noncomformists, who for the purposes of this narrative may be called "Templetonians." They were not a wealthy body by any means, and their meeting-place was a large room up a narrow court in one of the least reputable streets in Ashdown, which had at one time been used as a granary. Like other and far more pretentious religious bodies, the Templetonians were desirous of making as many proselytes as possible; and, with that end in view, were in the habit, during the summer months, of sending out such of their members as showed any gifts in the way of extempore preaching and praying into the villages round about, where, on Sunday evenings, they made a point of "holding forth" to such of the rural population as cared to listen to them. Among those rough-and-ready expounders of the peculiar tenets of the Templetonians, Ephraim Judd was one of the most popular and effective. He had that baneful gift of fluency which enables its possessor to bury the platitudes and commonplaces which, five times out of six, form his sole stock in trade, under a flow of words which his ignorant hearers mistake for eloquence, and which, for the time being, imparts to what he has to say some of the relish of original thought. It was a faculty the possession of which Ephraim had discovered by accident--it is almost needless to say that he regarded it as a special gift from a Superior power--but after he had once become aware of its existence, he did not fail to exercise it as often as an opportunity of doing so offered itself. But Ephraim was thoroughly in earnest in his preaching and expounding; whatever his other failings might be, he was far from being a conscious hypocrite. It was only during the light evenings between April and September that Ephraim and his co-workers could look to get an open-air audience together. Had they attempted to do so during the ordinary hours of morning service, the rural police would undoubtedly have ordered them to "move on;" while on hot summer afternoons, after the heavy Sunday dinner, the bucolic inclination is for sleep, rather than for mental excitations of even the most rudimentary kind, however stimulating the latter may be when indulged in at proper times and seasons.