And it was then that the Promoter of Companies learned for the first time how much easier it is to make a priest than to unmake him. For situation after situation arose in which the master of the Leonian quarries found himself confronted by an alien Power--a Power that refused to worship Sandstone. Before this rupture, however, the young Priest had persuaded Mr. Romer to let him live in the Old Vicarage, a small but cheerful house just opposite the church door. The orthodox vicarage, a rambling Early Victorian structure standing in its own grounds at the end of the West Drive, was let--once more at the Priest’s suggestion--to the last living representatives of the dispossessed Seldoms. It indicated a good deal of spirit on the part of Valentia Seldom and her daughter thus to return to the home of their ancestors. Mrs. Seldom was a cousin of the man who had sold the estate. Her daughter Vennie, brought up in a school at Florence, had never seen Nevilton, and it was with the idea of taking advantage for the girl’s sake of their old prestige in that corner of England that Valentia accepted Mr. Romer’s offer and became the vicarage tenant. The quarry-owner himself was influenced in carrying through this affair, by his anxiety, for the sake of _his_ daughter, to secure a firmer footing with the aristocracy of the neighborhood. Here again, however, he was destined to disappointment: for once in possession of her twenty years’ lease the old lady showed not the least intention of letting herself be used as a social stepping-stone. She had, indeed, under her own roof, cause enough for preoccupation and concern. Her daughter--a little ghost-moth of a girl, of fragile delicacy--seemed entirely devoid of that mysterious magnetic attraction which lures to the side of most virgins the devotion of the opposite sex. She appeared perfectly content to remain forever in her tender maidenhood, and refused to exert the slightest effort to be “nice” to the charming young people her mother threw in her way. She belonged to that class of young girls who seem to be set apart by nature for other purposes than those of the propagation of the race. Her wistful spirit, shrinking into itself like the leaves of a sensitive plant at the least approach of a rough hand, responded only to one passionate impulse, the impulse of religion. She grew indeed so estranged from the normal world, that it was not only Valentia who concealed the thought that when she left the earth the ancient race of Seldoms would leave it with her.