Matilda was grateful. She was sufficiently overcome with the honour thus conferred on her to satisfy even Mr Jones' colossal vanity. Mr Jones accepted his triumph with becoming condescension; to describe his air as elated would be misleading. His manner towards his affianced wife, who was several years his senior, and had never been handsome, was benevolently patronising. His courtship was business-like, and free from those affectations of silly sentiment so unsuited to his calling. If Miss Matilda regretted the lack of lover-like attentions, she concealed her disappointment, clinging insistently to the belief that everything that Ernest did was right and dignified. It would have been unbecoming in a clergyman to be demonstrative. "I used to think," she confessed to Prudence in a moment of rare confidence, "that it was you he admired. You remember how he used to persist in accompanying us on our walks, and how he talked principally with you? All the while he was thinking of me. He told me so. Isn't it wonderful?" "He has the sense," Prudence answered, and kissed the flushed face kindly, "to realise that you will make the best wife in the world for a clergyman." And she thought of Bobby's epithet, "money-grubbing little worm," and decided that it aptly fitted Ernest. Bobby chaffed her about the curate, affecting to believe she had suffered a disappointment. Prudence did not confide in him the tale of the curate's duplicity; loyalty to Matilda kept her silent on that subject. But her wrathful disgust was roused on the day of Matilda's wedding, when Mr Jones, claiming the privilege of a brother, caught her unprepared in the hall and kissed her unsuspecting lips. "If you ever take such a liberty with me again," she said, white and angry, "I will make you the laughing-stock of Wortheton." He assumed an air of dignity while conscious of looking ridiculous. Her words, her tone in uttering them, lashed him into a rage of hatred that cured him finally of any tender thought he had cherished in regard to her. He spoke of her later to his wife as ill-mannered and ungentle of temper, a description which, while holding it to be ungenerous, occasioned Matilda considerable comfort. She had felt uneasily jealous of Prudence at times, even during the days of her brief engagement. Mr Jones had shown such predilection for the society of the younger sister that Matilda, like Leah, was made to realise the humiliating position of the substitute. Her faith in his uprightness did not allow of disbelief; besides which his ill-natured criticism of her young sister carried conviction; his tone expressed cordial dislike. "Fuller acquaintance with her reveals her more objectionable qualities," he said. "I believed her to be a nice, simple girl, but she is certainly not that." "Prudence is very warm-hearted," Matilda said weakly in defence of the absent. "But father spoils her a little."