"'Darkness makes clear, that Light must be near,'--I am sure that is true!"--murmured John, as he swung along at a quick pace through a green lane leading out of the village into the wider country, where two or three quaint little houses with thatched roofs were nestled among the fields, looking like dropped acorns in the green,--"It must be true,--there are so many old saws and sayings of the same kind, like 'The darkest hour's before the dawn.' But why should I seek to console myself with a kind of Tupper 'proverbial philosophy'? I have no black hour threatening me,--I have nothing in the world to complain of or grumble at except my own undisciplined nature, which even at my age shows me it can 'kick against the pricks' and make a fool of me!"
Here turning a corner of the road which was overshaded by a huge chestnut-tree, he suddenly came face to face with the Reverend Putwood Leveson, who, squatted on the hank by the roadside, with his grand-pianoforte legs well exposed to view in tight brown knickerbockers and grey worsted stockings, was bending perspiringly over his recumbent bicycle, mending something which had, as usual, gone wrong.
"Hullo, Walden!" he said, looking up and nodding casually--"Haven't seen you for an age! What have you been doing with yourself? Always up at the Manor, I suppose! Great attraction at the Manor!--he-he- he!"
A certain quick irritation, like that produced by the teasing buzz of some venomous insect, affected Walden's nerves. He looked at the porcine proportions of his brother minister with an involuntary sense of physical repulsion. Then he answered stiffly-"I don't understand you. I have not been visiting at the Manor at all. I dined there the night before last for the first and only time."
Leveson winked one purple puffy eyelid. Then he began his 'He-he-he' again to himself, while he breathed hard and sweated profusely over the rubber tyre of his machine.
"Is that so?" he sniggered--"Well, that's all the better for you!-- you do well to keep away! Men of our cloth ought not to be seen there really."
And scrambling to his feet with elephantine ease, he brushed the dust from his knickers, and wiped his brows with an uncleanly handkerchief which looked as if it had been used for drying oil off the bicycle as well as off the man.
"We ought not to be seen there,"--he repeated, disregarding Walden's steady coldness of eye--"I myself made a great mistake when I wrote to the woman. I ought not to have done so. But of course I did not know--I thought it was all right." And the reverend gentleman assumed an air of mammoth-like innocence--"I am so mediaeval, you know!--I never suspect anything or anybody! I wrote to her in quite a friendly way, suggesting that I should arrange her family papers for her--I thought she might as well employ me as anyone else--and she never answered my letter--never answered a word!"