As for Miss Leonora, she waited for her nephew, and, when he was ready, took his arm and walked with him up Grange Lane to her own door, where they encountered Miss Wentworth and Miss Dora returning from church, and overwhelmed them with astonishment. But it was not about his own affairs that they talked. Miss Leonora did not say a word to her nephew about himself. She was talking of Gerald most of the time, and inquiring into all the particulars of the Squire's late "attack." And she would very fain have found out what Jack's motive was in coming to Carlingford; but as for Rosa Elsworthy and her concerns, the strong-minded woman ignored them completely. Mr Wentworth even went with her to lunch, on her urgent invitation; and it was from his aunts' house that he took his way to Wharfside, pausing at the green door to ask after the Miss Wodehouses, who were, John said, with solemnity, as well as could be expected. They were alone, and they did not feel equal to seeing anybody--even Mr Wentworth; and the Perpetual Curate, who would have given all he had in the world for permission to soothe Lucy in her sorrow, went away sadly from the hospitable door, which was now for the first time closed to him. He could not go to Wharfside, to the "district" through which they had so often gone together, about which they had talked, when all the little details discussed were sweet with the love which they did not name, without going deeper and deeper into that sweet shadow of Lucy which was upon his way wherever he went. He could not help missing her voice when the little choir, which was so feeble without her, sang the 'Magnificat,' which, somehow, Mr Wentworth always associated with her image. He read the same sermon to the Wharfside people which he had preached in St Roque's, and saw, with a little surprise, that it drew tears from the eyes of his more open-hearted hearers, who did not think of the proprieties. He could see their hands stealing up to their faces, and a great deal of persistent winking on the part of the stronger members of the congregation. At the close of the service Tom Burrows came up to the Curate with a downcast countenance. "Please, sir, if I've done ye injustice in my own mind, as went sore against the grain, and wouldn't have happened but for the women, I axes your pardon," said the honest bargeman, which was balm and consolation to Mr Wentworth. There was much talk in Prickett's Lane on the subject as he went to see the sick woman in No. 10. "There aint no doubt as he sets our duty before us clear," said one family mother; "he don't leave the men no excuse for their goings-on. He all but named the Bargeman's Arms out plain, as it was the place all mischief comes from." "If he'd have married Miss Lucy, like other folks, at Easter," said one of the brides whom Mr Wentworth had blessed, "such wicked stories couldn't never have been made up." "A story may be made up, or it mayn't be made up," said a more experienced