It had lasted two years nearly, and was still alive and angry, when the Reverend William Maybell took a cold, which no one thought would signify. A brother clergyman from Willowford kindly undertook his duty for one Sunday, and on the next he had died. The Wyvern doctor said the vis-vitæ was wanting--he had lived quite too low, and had not stamina, and so sank like a child. But there was more. When on Sundays, as the sweet bell of Wyvern trembled in the air, the Vicar had walked alone up to the old gray porch, and saw the two trees near the ivied nook of the churchyard-wall, a home-sickness yearned at his heart, and when the hour came his spirit acquiesced in death. Old Squire Fairfield knew that it was the Bishop who really, and, as I believe, rightly opposed him, for to this day the vicarage pays no rent; but the proud and violent man chose to make the Vicar feel his resentment. He beheld him with a gloomy and thunderous aspect, never a word more would he exchange with him; he turned his back upon him; he forbid him the footpath across the fields of Wyvern, that made the way to church shorter. He walked out of church grimly when his sermon began. He turned the Vicar’s cow off the common, and made him every way feel the weight of his displeasure. Well, now the Vicar was dead. He had borne it all very gently and sadly, and it was over, a page in the past, no line erasable, no line addible for ever. “So Parson’s dead and buried; serve him right,” said the Squire of Wyvern. “Thankless rascal. You go down and tell them I must have the house up on the 24th, and if they don’t go, you bundle ’em out, Thomas Rooke.” “There’ll be the Vicar’s little child there; who’s to take it in, Squire?” asked Tom Rooke, after a hesitation. “You may, or the Bishop, d---- him.” “I’m a poor man, and, for the Bishop, he’s not like to----” “Let ’em try the workhouse,” said the Squire, “where many a better man’s brat is.” And he gave Tom Rooke a look that might have knocked him down, and turned his back on him and walked away. A week or so after he went down himself to the vicarage with Tom Rooke. Old Dulcibella Crane went over the lower part of the house with Tom, and the Squire strode up the stairs, and stooping his tall head as he entered the door, walked into the first room he met with, in a surly mood. The clatter of his boots prevented his hearing, till he had got well into the room, the low crying of a little child in a cradle. He stayed his step for a moment. He had quite forgotten that unimportant being, and he half turned to go out again, but changed his mind. He stooped over the cradle, and the little child’s crying ceased. It was a very pretty face and large eyes, still wet with tears, that looked up with an earnest wondering gaze at him from out the tiny blankets.