I called at a good many houses in the village. I am thankful to say I have rarely found myself unwelcome, to the best sort of people at least. Most of us have known each other so long, and have such a long stretch of memory to go back upon together, that we belong to each other in a way. As for the scapegraces, they are a little frightened of me, I confess. They say, Miss Milly comes a-worriting, when I speak my mind to them. I can’t say the men reverence me, nor the women bless my influence, as I read they do with some ladies in some of Miss Kate Roberts’ books. But we are good friends on the whole. When the men have been drinking, and spent all their wages, or saucy, and put out of their place, then they try their best to deceive me, to be sure; but I know all their little contrivances pretty well by this time. They don’t mean much harm after all, only to persuade one that things are not so bad as they look. After I had given a glance into the shop where I saw Mr. Luigi’s fat servant,--I only saw him once, but yet the place seemed full of that fat, funny, good-humoured, outlandish figure, with his bows and smiles, and loquacious foreign speech, that poor Mrs. Taylor commiserated so deeply--I stepped across to the rectory to make a call there. The poor young shopkeeper, who had a night-class for the men and grown lads, and was really an intelligent, well-meaning young man, had been confiding his troubles to me. They did not care a bit about learning; they did not even want to read. When they did read it was the most foolish books! Poor young Taylor’s heart was breaking over their stupidity. And then, to keep a shop, even a bookshop, hurt his “feelings,” poor lad. He had been brought up for a teacher’s profession, he said--he even had some experience in “tuition.” He had thought he could make a home for his mother and his little sister; and now Dr. Appleby was grumbling that he did not succeed, and thought it his own fault! Poor young fellow! to be sure, he should have gone stolidly through with it, and had no business to have any “feelings.” But, you see, people will be foolish in every condition of life. So I stepped across the road to call on Miss Kate, thinking of him all the way; thinking of him and that unknown young Italian, only once seen, whom the apparition of the fat servant in Taylor’s shop somehow connected with the young shopkeeper. How Mr. Luigi had forced himself into all my thoughts! and yet the only one fact I knew about him was, that he was looking for an apocryphal lady whom nobody ever heard of! Should I have thought no more about him but for Sarah’s mysterious agitation? I really cannot tell. Again and again his voice came back to me, independent of Sarah. Whose voice was it? Where had he got that hereditary tone?