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326 begun to make love to Beatrice, or committed himself by the utterance of any opinion as to the propriety of clerical marriages; but he daily became looser about his peculiar tenets, raved less immoderately than heretofore as to the atrocity of the Greshamsbury church pews, and was observed to take some opportunities of conversing alone with Beatrice. Beatrice had always denied the imputation—this had usually been made by Mary in their happy days—with vehement asseverations of anger; and Miss Gushing had tittered, and expressed herself as supposing that great people's daughters might be as barefaced as they pleased.

All this had happened previous to the great Greshamsbury feud. Mr. Oriel gradually got himself into a way of sauntering up to the great house, sauntering into the drawing-room for the purpose, as I am sure he thought, of talking to Lady Arabella, and then of sauntering home again, having usually found an opportunity for saying a few words to Beatrice during the visit. This went on all through the feud up to the period of Lady Arabella's illness; and then one morning, about a month before the date fixed for Frank's return, Mr. Oriel found himself engaged to Miss Beatrice Gresham.

From the day that Miss Gushing heard of it—which was not however for some considerable time after this—she became an independent methodist. She could no longer, she said at first, have any faith in any religion; and for an hour or so she was almost tempted to swear that she could no longer have any faith in any man. She had nearly completed a worked cover for a credence-table when the news reached her, as to which, in the young enthusiasm of her heart, she had not been able to remain silent; it had already been promised to Mr. Oriel; that promise she swore should not be kept. He was an apostate, she said, from his principles; an utter pervert; a false, designing man, with whom she would never have trusted herself alone on dark mornings had she known that he had such grovelling, worldly inclinations. So Miss Gushing became an independent methodist; the credence-table covering was cut up into slippers for the preacher's feet; and the young thing herself, more happy in this direction than she had been in the other, became the arbiter of that preacher's domestic happiness.

But this little history of Miss Gushing's future life is premature. Mr. Oriel became engaged demurely, nay, almost silently, to Beatrice, and no one out of their own immediate families was at the time informed of the matter. It was arranged very differently from those two other matches—embryo, or not embryo, those, namely, of Augusta with Mr. Moffat, and Frank with Mary Thorne. All Barsetshire had heard of them; but that of