"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."
Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector, whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her slender _vis-à-vis_ presented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms, seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that even the dull eyes of her _vis-à-vis_ not alone reflected, but confirmed, how lovely she was.
The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that he already knew its hearsays and its _on dits_ and he knew when she asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery--for as she would she could not help falling into them even with this half-human creature--wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to descend to scandal; at all events, after dinner, over a cigar smoked in her presence, the empty glass of Benedictine at his elbow, in his cheeks a muddy red diffused from his wine, the gentleman leaned forward, and tried to adapt his speech and topic to the worldly vein which he imagined was the habitual tenor of a fashionable woman's life.
"Even this lovely shire," he drawled its beauty--"cannot, so it would seem, be free from scandal. And where a minister would naturally look for help, wretchedly enough for the most part he only finds examples and warnings."
The rector lifted his eyes to the fine old ceiling as if in its shields and blazons he was impressed by the blots of recent sins.