When the sermon was over, and we filed out of church, I noticed that old Mr. Reade exchanged a few words with Mr. Rayner rather stiffly, while the two girls deliberately turned their heads away from us. But Mr. Laurence Reade hung back behind the rest of his family, and stooped to speak to Haidee, who was holding my hand. He asked her to give him a kiss, and she refused--and I was very glad. Of course it was my duty to rebuke her for rudeness, and to tell her to accept the attention with gratitude; but, instead, I looked carefully the other way and pretended not to be aware of the little comedy. “Oh, Haidee, you shouldn’t turn away from your friends!” said he, in his musical voice, with rather more of grave reproach than the occasion required--to a child. Mr. Rayner was on the churchyard path a little way in front of us, talking to the schoolmaster, the clergyman, and two or three of the gentlemen of the parish. He was trying to persuade them to start a penny bank, and was pointing out to them the encouragement it would give to habits of thrift, and offering to take most of the trouble of starting it into his own hands. The spirit of inactivity ruled at Geldham; there was no energetic curate to scandalize people by insisting that to doze through one sermon a week was but a negligent way of caring for their souls; the last vestry-meeting had dwindled into a spelling-bee, at which the doctor had been ruled out for putting only one “t” in “committee,” and gone home vehemently affirming that his was the right way, and that of the schoolmaster, his colleagues, and the dictionary, the wrong. It was curious to note now how they all listened coldly at first, with an aversion to the proposal, strengthened by their dislike to the man who proposed it, and how, overcome by an irresistible charm in his manner of arguing as much as by the arguments themselves, they one by one from listless became interested, and not only agreed to the scheme being started, but to taking each some small share in setting it on foot. Then, parting cordially from the man they had greeted so coldly, they all dispersed; and Mr. Rayner, handsome, bright, pleased with his little triumph, turned to his wife and led her to the carriage, while Haidee and I returned as we came--on foot. He was very severe indeed upon rustic wits and rustic governors during dinner, calling them sheep and donkeys and other things. Then he grew merry and made jokes about them, and I laughed; and, finding in me an appreciative listener, his spirits rose still higher, and I thought before dinner was over that I had never heard any one talk more amusingly. I think Mrs. Rayner made only one remark, and that was when I was furtively wiping some tears of laughter from my eyes; she asked me-- “Do you care to go to church this afternoon, Miss Christie?” I suppose I looked rather snubbed, for Mr. Rayner broke in--