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Lady Larch is wearing her brightest smile!" "Must we be very earnest this evening?" "I am afraid so. You see, I have secured Pole-Knox. He has never been permitted to dine here before." "Why not?" "Because I once told Lady Augusta that he was a man for the shortest part of the afternoon not for evenings, at all. She couldn't forgive this." "Does she forgive it now?" "Yes.
The guests included Reckage himself, Orange, Charles Aumerle, the Dowager Countess of Larch, Hartley Penborough, Lady Augusta Hammit, and the Bishop of Calbury's chaplain, the Rev. Edwin Pole-Knox.
But the card-tables were already placed, and Sara lost no time in arranging a quartette for whist. Penborough had to leave for the Times office. Pole-Knox had to hurry back to Fulham. The young lady, who was known to detest all games, was thus able to choose Robert for her partner in a short conversation. "Forgive me," said she, "but have you anything to tell me about Mrs. Parflete?"
Pole-Knox remarked over his fish that England had little to fear unless through the corruption of her religion, whereupon Penborough declared that religion in the country was a School, not a Church. To this Lady Augusta rejoined that Rome's strength depended merely on Canterbury's weakness.
In fact, she was often found dull. She was not especially disturbed about the woes of humanity, and her maternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian cotton-merchant. She bore Pole-Knox away to a far corner and begged to be told all the latest details of Miss Carillon's abominable conduct. "I do not exactly know," said she, "the state of things. The poor dear Bishop must be in a dreadful state."
Then she stepped forward to greet Lady Augusta Hammit, who was at that moment announced. Lady Augusta was a tall woman about thirty-five years of age, with a handsome, sallow face, a superb neck, beautiful arms, hair the colour of ashes, pale lips, and large, gleaming white teeth. Unmarried, aristocratic, ordinarily well-off, and exceptionally pious according to her lights, she was a prominent figure in all work connected with the Moderate Party in the Church of England. In her opinion, foreigners might be permitted the idolatries of Rome; as for the English, Wesley was a lunatic; Pusey, a weak good creature; Newman was a traitor; Manning, a mistake. The one vital force on whom she depended for her spiritual illumination and her life's security was the Rev. Edwin Pole-Knox. "Pole-Knox," she said, "will save us yet." This good and industrious young man, a few years her junior, had been chaplain mainly through Lady Augusta's devoted exertions to three bishops. He did every credit to his patroness, but hints were already in the air on the subject of ingratitude. Some said he lacked ambition; others murmured dark conjectures about his heartlessness. It was left to the Lady Augusta's fellow-labourers in the sphere of beneficence to blurt out, with odious vulgarity, that he would never marry her in this world. She entered the room that evening in her haughtiest manner, for Pole-Knox was following close upon her heels, and she wished to justify the extreme deference which he showed her so properly in public, and perhaps with morbid conscientiousness in tête-
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