"Ah, so do I! But Skelwick isn't a parish by itself, it's only a part of North Ditton. If Dad accepts the living of Rawtenbeck he'll be a vicar then, and he says there's any amount of work to be done in the place. The church has been fearfully slack! He hardly knows which needs him most, Skelwick or Rawtenbeck." "When must he make up his mind?" "Fortunately, not immediately. The Bishop has given him six weeks to think it over before he need decide." "Then we've six weeks' reprieve," said Gwen. She was extremely agitated at the news. She had often thought in a vague way how nice it would be if her father were appointed to a living, but she had never anticipated such a change as this. To remove to a smoky, dirty manufacturing town, where even the trees were blighted with chemicals! The proposition seemed intolerable. Gwen hurried out of the garden and climbed a little way up the headland at the back of the house. It was Saturday morning, and there were plenty of tasks to be done at home, but at the present she felt she must be alone with her thoughts. To leave Skelwick--to go away from all this and perhaps never see it again! She sat down on a rock, and took a long comprehensive look over the whole landscape. There were the cliffs, and the headland, and the great wide stretch of rolling, shimmering sea, and the little red sails of the fishing smacks far out on the blue horizon; below her stretched the village, with its irregular red roofs and gay patches of flower gardens, and the shingly cove where some of the boats lay beached. She could just see the chimneys of the Parsonage, and the corner of the tennis lawn where Martin was playing with Jingles, and a scrap of the common where Winnie's hens were pecking in the coarse grass. Above the village, a conspicuous object against the sky, rose their little church of St. John the Baptist, standing on the high headland at the very edge of the bare wold, as Father often said, like a voice crying in the wilderness. Who would come there, she wondered, if Dad went? Skelwick was only a chapel-of-ease to North Ditton, and before Mr. Gascoyne's time the place had been much neglected. No resident clergyman had lived there, and though a curate had come from the Parish Church at North Ditton to take Sunday services, no attempt had been made to get hold of the rough fisher folk in the district. It had been uphill work, and with very little assistance or encouragement, for Mr. Sutton, the rector, was old and in delicate health, and quite unable to take any active part; indeed, for many years he had never visited Skelwick or the neighbouring hamlets. "Everything worth having here is owing to Dad," thought Gwen. "I don't know how he'd ever bear to leave it."