"You are very kind," said the Vicar in high delight; "let me see, let me see! Well, dear Maud as a girl had always a very high and anxious sense of responsibility and duty. She conceived of herself--perhaps owing to some chance expressions of my own--as bound as far as possible to fill the place of her dear mother--a gap, of course, that it was impossible to fill,--my own pursuits are, you will realise, mere distractions, or, to be frank, were originally so designed, to combat my sense of loss. But I am personally not a man who makes a morbid demand for sympathy--I have little use for sympathy. I face my troubles alone; I suffer alone," said the Vicar with an incredible relish. "And then Jack is an independent boy, and has no taste for being dominated. So that I fear that dear Maud's most touching efforts hardly fell on very responsive soil. She felt, I think, the failure of her efforts; and kind as Cousin Anne is, there is, I think, a certain vagueness of outline about her mind. I would not call her a fatalist, but she has little conception of the possibility of moulding character;--it's a rich mind, but perhaps an indecisive mind? Maud needed a vocation--she needed an aim. And then, too, you have perhaps observed--or possibly," said the Vicar gleefully, "she has effaced that characteristic out of deference to your own great power of amiable toleration--but she had a certain incisiveness of speech which had some power to wound? I will give you a small instance. Gibbs, the schoolmaster, is a very worthy man, but he has a certain flightiness of manner and disposition. Dear Maud, talking about him one day at our luncheon-table, said that one read in books how some people had to struggle with some underlying beast in their constitution, the voracious man, let us say, with the pig-like element, the cruel man with the tiger-like quality. 'Mr. Gibbs,' she said, 'seems to me to be struggling not with a beast, but with a bird.' She went on very amusingly to say that he reminded her of a wagtail, tripping along with very short steps, and only saved by adroitness from overbalancing. It was a clever description of poor Gibbs--but I felt it somehow to be indiscreet. Well, you know, poor Gibbs came to me a few days later--you realise how gossip spreads in these places--and said that he was hurt in his mind to think that Miss Maud should call him a water-wagtail. Servants' tattle, I suppose. I was considerably annoyed at this, and Maud insisted on going to apologise to Gibbs, which was a matter of some delicacy, because she could not deny that she had applied the soubriquet--or is it sobriquet?--to him. That is just a minute instance of the sort of thing I mean." "I confess," said Howard, "that I do recognise Maud's touch--she has a strong sense of humour."