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Canon Wrottesley, who still believed that his wife was only feeling the effects of the winter weather, the spring weather, the summer weather, or the autumn weather, was as gay and debonair as usual, and even at the wedding it was felt that he was in some sort the centre of things.
Wrottesley is looking over the guild work in the morning-room, said Miss Abingdon conscientiously. She loved a chat with the vicar, and thought him more genial and charming when his wife was not present. 'Shall I tell her you are here? 'She likes taking a look at the things the girls have made, said the canon indulgently.
Wrottesley playing the old hymn-tunes on the little organ. He could not remember ever attending very particularly to the evening service. He had never been a religious man in the ordinary sense of the word. He had wished with all his heart when his mother died that he had known more about sacred things, but they had never seemed a necessary part of his life.
Miss Abingdon liked to lean on a spiritual guide, and she thought that this was the graceful and becoming attitude for all women. Wrottesley, who for twenty years had been silent under reproof, relapsed into silence again. Jane, meanwhile, was saying good-bye to every tenant on Miss Abingdon's small estate.
Perhaps he was at his best at a christening party; he had won much affection from his parishioners by his felicitous remarks upon these occasions. When the gravity of the christening of the infant was over Canon Wrottesley always deliberately relaxed.
Wrottesley saw all this quite plainly, and loved him none the less for it. 'How is your cold? said Miss Abingdon, with sympathy in her voice, and the vicar threw back his handsome head and tapped his throat, which he said was a bit husky still, although it was no use giving way to illness.
For instance, before reaching Penkridge we pass on the right hand, Moseley Court, where the ancestors of the proprietors, the Whitgreaves, concealed Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester, on the left, Wrottesley Hall, the seat of the scientific nobleman of that name, and Chellington Park, the residence of the ancient Roman Catholic family of the Giffords, where an avenue of oaks, the growth of centuries, with a magnificent domain stocked with deer and game, afford the admirers of English scenery delicious vistas of wood, water, and rich undulating pasture.
Mrs. Wrottesley had a theory, which she never asked nor expected any one to share with her, that most men's mental development ceased at the age of twelve years. She had watched five sons grow up with, in their young boyhood, the hardly concealed conviction that each one of them was destined to be a genius, and that each one would make his mark in the world.
An invitation to the proposed merry-making was given to Peter, who was ever so much obliged, but thought Canon Wrottesley had forgotten that the 24th was the day of the races.
After morning service Miss Abingdon walked to the Vicarage and bestowed her yearly gifts upon the Wrottesley family. It was a matter of conscience with her to give a present of exactly the same value to Mrs. Wrottesley as to the canon, and this year she offered her little gifts with a good deal of compunction, remembering how difficult she had often found it to be quite fair in the distribution.
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