This served to startle Mrs. Cleeve--though she only half believed it. She wrote to Sir Karl, saying that both herself and the Colonel wished to see Lucy home, and begged of him to return and take up his abode at Foxwood. Karl replied that Foxwood was not ready for them; there was no establishment. Mrs. Cleeve wrote again--urging that she and Theresa should go down and engage two or three servants, just enough to receive himself and Lucy: afterwards they could take on more at will. A few days' delay and Karl's second answer came. He thanked Mrs. Cleeve for the trouble she offered to take, and accepted it: specifying a wish that the servants should be natives of the locality--and who had always lived in it. "Karl wishes to employ his poor neighbours," observed Mrs. Cleeve. "He is right, Theresa. You must see how good and thoughtful he is." Theresa could find no cause to confute this much. But she was more and more persuaded that Sir Karl would have kept Lucy away from Foxwood if he could. And we must admit that it looked like it. Mrs. Cleeve lost no time in going down with Miss Blake to Foxwood Court. Hewitt, who had been left in charge, with an elderly woman, received them. They thought they had never seen a more respectable or thoroughly efficient retainer than Hewitt. The gardeners were the only other servants employed. They lived out of doors: the chief one, Maclean, inhabiting the lodge with his wife. While Miss Blake was looking out for some young women servants, two or three of whom were speedily found and engaged, she made it her business to look also after the village and its inhabitants. That Miss Blake had a peculiar faculty for searching out information, was indisputable: never a better one for the task than she: and when an individual is gifted with this quality in a remarkable degree, it has to be more or less exercised. Miss Blake might have been a successful police detective: attached to a private inquiry office she would have made its fortune. And what she learnt gave her a profound contempt for Foxwood. We are speaking of the village now: not the Court. In the first place, there was no church: or, at least, what Miss Blake chose to consider none. The vicar, Mr. Sumnor, set his face against views of an extreme kind, and that was enough for Miss Blake to wage war with. Old Sumnor, to sum him up in Miss Blake's words, might be conscientious enough, but he was as slow as a tortoise. She attended his church the first Sunday, and found it unbearably tame. There were no candles or flowers or banners or processions: and there was no regular daily service held. Miss Blake thought one might as well be without breakfast and dinner. Foxwood was a benighted place and nothing less.