Now, however, it had fully dawned upon her that she herself, tranquil and simple in early maturity, no longer a girl, as she said to herself, nor in the age of romance, had come to that moment of sovereignty which sooner or later falls to most women, notwithstanding all statistics--the power of actually affecting, disposing of, the life of another. It does not always turn out to be of profound importance in a man’s life that he has been refused by a certain woman. But for the time, at least, both parties feel that it is of great importance: and the result of acceptance, colouring and determining the course of two lives, cannot be exaggerated. Susie discovered, first with amusement, afterwards with a little fright, that the visits of Percy Spencer and of Mr. Cattley were not without meaning. The two curates, who were so different! Their position gave them a certain right to come, and her position as a stranger and a temporary inhabitant exempted her, so far, at least, as she was aware, from the remarks and criticisms to which another young woman living alone might have been subject. But Susie had nobody to interfere, no duenna, not even a well-trained maid to say not at home. These visitors came in with a little preliminary knock at the parlour door without asking if it was permitted--without any formality of announcement. The door of the house was always open, and Sarah in the kitchen would have thought it strange indeed to be interrupted in her morning work by anyone ringing at the bell. A month is a long time when it is passed in this land of intimacy. Susie was asked frequently to the rectory, not always with Mrs. Egerton’s free will--but there are necessities in that way which ladies in the country cannot ignore: and it was very rarely that a day passed without a meeting in the village street, if no more--at some cottage where Susie had made herself useful, but most frequently in her own little sanctuary, in the parlour so familiar to both these gentlemen, so much more familiar to them than to her. At first they were continually meeting there, and their meetings were not pleasant. For Percy did his best to exasperate Mr. Cattley by a pretended deference to his old age and antiquated notions, or by the elevation of his own standard of churchmanship over the mild pretensions of the clergyman who did not call himself a priest. And Mr. Cattley would retaliate by times with a middle-aged contempt for boyish enthusiasms, by assuring his young friend that by-and-by he would see things in a different light.