"Oh, the prince has not come yet," said Bessie with her beautiful blush. Mrs. Carnegie emitted a gentle sound, calling everybody to order, and they entered the church. Bessie halted at the Carnegie pew, but the children filled it, and as she knew those boys were only kept quiet during service by maternal control, she passed on to the Fairfield pew in the chancel, where Dora Meadows was already ensconced. Lady Latimer presently arrived alone: Mr. Logger had committed himself to an opinion that it was a shame to waste such a glorious morning in church, and had declined, at the last moment, to come. He preferred to criticise preachers without hearing them. The congregation was much fuller than Bessie remembered it formerly. Beechhurst had reconciled itself to its pastor, and had found him not so very bad after all. There was no other church within easy reach, divine worship could not, with safety, be neglected altogether, and the aversion with which he was regarded did not prove invincible. It was the interest of the respectable church-people to get over it, and they had got over it, pleading in extenuation of their indulgence that, in the first place, the rector was a fixture, and in the second that his want of social tact was his misfortune rather than his fault, and a clergyman might have even worse defects than that. Lady Latimer, Admiral Parkins, Mr. Musgrave, and Miss Wort had supported him in his office from the first, and now Mr. Phipps and Mr. Carnegie did not systematically absent themselves from his religious ministrations.