Marian went with the rest of the party to church, and sat with them immediately opposite the head-master's seat, where she had sat for so many years, and which, was directly in front of the big school pew. What memories came over her as she looked across the aisle! Her eyes rested on the manly figure and the M.B. waistcoat of Mr. Benthall, who sat in the place of honour; but after an instant he seemed to disappear as in a dissolving view, and there came in his place a bowed and shrunken elderly man, with small white hands nestling under his ample cuffs, all his clothes seemingly too large for him, big lustrous eyes, pale complexion, and iron-gray hair. No other change in the whole church, save in that pew. The lame man who acted as a kind of verger still stumped up the pulpit-stairs, and arranged the cushion, greatly to the horror of the preacher of the day, Mr. Trollope, who, being a little man, could hardly be seen in the deep pulpit, and whose soft little voice could scarcely be heard out of the mass of wood and cotton velvet in which he was steeped to the ears. The butcher, who was also churchwarden and a leading member of the congregation, still applied to himself all the self-accusatory passages in the responses in the Psalms, and gave them out, looking round at his fellow-parishioners, in a tone of voice which seemed to say, "See what an infernal scoundrel I am, and how I delight in letting you know it!" The boys in the school were in the same places--many of them were the same boys; and the bigger ones, who had been in love with Marian when she lived among them, nudged each other as she came in, and then became scarlet from their clean collars to the roots of their freshly pomatumed hair. Fresh faces nowhere but there. Change in no life but hers. Yes, as her eye rested on Mr. Creswell's solemn suit of black she remembered that life had changed also for him. And somehow, she could scarcely tell how, she felt comforted by the thought. They left the church when the service was ended, but it was some time before they were able to start on their way home. Mr. Creswell came so seldom into Helmingham, that many of his old acquaintances saw him there for the first time since his wife's death, and came to offer their long-deferred condolence, and to chat over matters of local gossip. Marian, too, was always a welcome sight to the Helmingham people, and the women gathered round her and asked her about her mother's health, and of their prospects, and when they were going to leave Woolgreaves; to all of which questions Marian replied with perfect self-possession and without giving her querists any real information.