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"The lesson's First Samuel fifteen, Sir," said Tom Synden, and craned his head over the reading-desk, where the Parson was muttering to himself as he turned the pages.

§ 6

Evening Prayers had been duly, if somewhat absently, read. The Parson and the Clerk exchanged good nights, and Gervase walked through the churchyard to Leasan Vicarage. His father had rebuilt the house for him soon after his appointment to the living, and it was now handsome and commodious, less like a Vicarage than the house of a small country gentleman. It used to be a little thatched place, snug enough, but too small for a man just married and meaning to breed a family.

Gervase, as Vicar of Leasan, was the first of a long line of Alard's younger sons. On their return with the King, the family had found in occupation an Anabaptist crony of Accepted Harman's. Unable to change his religion as easily as Nicholas Pecksall, he had gone out with the rest of Cromwell's men on Black Bartholomew's day, and soon afterwards Sir Stephen Alard (baroneted by King Charles on Newbury field) had conceived the notion of presenting the living to Gervase. His elder son's boy was alive then and naturally regarded as the heir: he was only doing the best he could for the dissatisfied and rather strange young man who had returned with them from France. Gervase was more than thirty years old, and up till then, like the rest of them, had lived chiefly by his wits, knowing dire poverty as well as dissipation. He had been bred up to nothing, but he had always been fond of books and liable to serious fits, and his father discredited the rumour which accused him of going with the necromancers and magicians of Tours. Gervase would settle down into a good sort of country parson, he had not a doubt, and such an establishment would encourage him to marry and become more like other people.