“Well, of course there may have been a good cause for it,” the lawyer replied drily. “But it is a thing I have not known happen here for twenty years.” An altercation with these men, none of whom were well disposed toward him, and half of whom were tradespeople, was the last thing which the young rector should have allowed himself to enter upon, and the last thing indeed to which he would have condescended in his normal frame of mind. But on this unlucky morning he was nervous and irritable; and, finding himself thus bearded and defied, he spoke foolishly. “You trouble yourself too much, Mr. Bonamy,” he said impulsively, “with things which do not concern you! The parish, among other things. You have set yourself, as I know, to thwart and embarrass me; but I warn you that you are not strong enough! I shall find means to——” “To put me down, in fact?” said Mr. Bonamy. The young man hesitated, his face crimson. His opponent’s sallow features, seamed with a hundred astute wrinkles, warned him, if the covert smiles of the others did not, that, in his present mood at any rate, he was not a match for the lawyer. He had gone too far already, as he was now aware. “No,” he replied, swallowing his rage, “but to keep you to your proper province, as I hope to keep to mine. I wish you good morning.” He passed through them, and hurried away, more angry with them, and with himself for allowing them to provoke him, than he had ever felt in his life. He knew well that he had been foolish. He knew that he had lowered himself in their eyes by his display of temper. But, though he was bitterly annoyed with himself, the consciousness that the fault had originally lain with them, and that they had grievously misjudged him, kept his anger hot; for there is no wrath so fierce as the indignation of the man falsely accused. He called them under his breath an uncharitable, spiteful, tattling crew; and was so far unnerved in thought of them that he had entered his dining-room before he remembered that he was engaged to take the mid-day meal at the Town House, as he had done once or twice before, and then walked up with Laura to the schools. He washed and changed hurriedly, keeping his anger hot the while, and then went across, with the tale on the tip of his tongue. Again, if he had been wise, he would have kept what had happened to himself. But the soothing luxury of unfolding his wrong to some one who would sympathize was one he could not in his soreness forego.