At the moment when Faith, shading her eyes from the sun, was looking brightly up with instinctive coquetry, Job was settling in his waistcoat fob the globular silver watch which he had duly compared with his oracle in the tower. It was so bulky that it required a peculiar twist of his body to get it into the pocket at all, and wheft that difficulty was surmounted it formed an odd sort of protuberance, apt to impress beholders with a sympathetic sense of discomfort Faith, however, regarded it with due respect. "True to a minit," Job said in a tone of contented self-satisfaction. "Now, Faith, my dear, suppose you wos just to step in and tell Miss Marion that, without she's pretty sharp, we sha'n't get to Under'm by half past six, nor nothing like it." "She's on the stairs now," said Faith, reconnoitring, "and if there isn't Sarah come out of the kitchen to see her drest! I'm sure it is a wonder if she can stand there for a minute and not say something sharp. It wants the patience of a saint to live with Sarah." "And that doesn't come to everybody as it do to me,--with their name," said Job. "She's a woman who isn't tried with a hitch in her tongue, but she's a neat figure for a cook." "Well, I'm sure!" said Faith, pouting a little. "I never could see nothing in Sarah's figure,--but you'd better get down and open the door, Mr White." With so great a scarcity of conveyances, combinations were matters of necessity in Thorpe, and the fly had already driven to the Red House in order to pick up Mr Mannering. The delay in starting had been caused at least as much by the Vicar's desire to hear his opinion upon a certain pamphlet which, when sought for, turned out to be missing, as by Marion's lingering doubts between the respective merits of two white muslins; but the truth was that punctuality did not exist at the Vicarage, and the church bell on Sundays stretched itself indefinitely, until the Vicar himself looked out from the vestry door and nodded for it to stop. Mr Mannering, having, on the contrary, a lawyer's respect for time, had for the last ten minutes been sitting upon thorns, taking out his watch, and regarding the door with as much uneasiness as a courteous attention to Mrs Miles's household difficulties would permit. Anthony had walked into Underham to meet Marmaduke Lee, and Mr Mannering fell uninterruptedly to Mrs Miles's care, until the Vicar opened the door and informed him that they were ready, with the really serious conviction common to unpunctual people that his visitor was the person for whom they had all been waiting.