"What could happen?" said Mr Wodehouse, who still looked "limp" from his recent illness, "though I hear there are doubtful people about; so they tell me--but you ought to know best, Wentworth. Who is that fellow in the beard that went by on the other side? Not little Lake the drawing-master? Fancied I had seen the build of the man before--eh?--a stranger? Well, it's a mistake, perhaps. Can't be sure of anything nowadays;--memory failing. Well, that's what the doctor says. Come in and rest and see Molly; as for me, I'm not good for much, but you won't get better company than the girls, or else that's what folks tell me. Who did you say that fellow was?" said the churchwarden, leaning across his daughter to see Mr Wentworth's face. "I don't know anything about him," said the Curate of St Roque's. And curiously enough silence fell upon the little party, nobody could tell how;--for two minutes, which looked like twenty, no one spoke. Then Lucy roused herself, apparently with a little effort. "We seem to talk of nothing but the man with the beard to-night," she said. "Mary knows everything that goes on in Carlingford--she will tell us about him; and if Miss Wentworth thinks it too late to come in, we will say good-night," she continued, with a little decision of tone, which was not incomprehensible to the Perpetual Curate. Perhaps she was a little provoked and troubled in her own person. To say so much in looks and so little in words, was a mode of procedure which puzzled Lucy. It fretted her, because it looked unworthy of her hero. She withdrew within the green door, holding her father's arm fast, and talking to him, while Mr Wentworth strained his ears after the voice, which he thought he could have singled out from a thousand voices. Perhaps Lucy talked to drown her thoughts; and the Curate went away dumb and abstracted, with his aunt leaning on his arm on the other side of the wall. He could not be interested, as Miss Dora expected him to be, in the Miss Wentworths' plans. He conducted her to the Blue Boar languidly, with an evident indifference to the fact that his aunt Leonora was about to become a permanent resident in Carlingford. He said "Good-night" kindly to little Rosa Elsworthy, looking out with bright eyes into the darkness at the door of her uncle's shop; but he said little to Miss Dora, who could not tell what to make of him, and swallowed her tears as quietly as possible under her veil. When he had deposited his aunt safely at the inn, the Perpetual Curate hastened down Grange Lane at a great pace. The first sound he heard on entering Mrs Hadwin's garden was the clear notes of the stranger's whistle among the trees; and with an impatient exclamation Mr Wentworth sought his fellow-lodger, who was smoking as usual, pacing up and down a shaded walk, where, even in daylight, he was pretty well concealed from observation. The Curate looked as if he had a little discontent