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"Yes, grandpapa," said Frank. "And Tom said: 'Oh, people be good and you will go to heaven, but if you are not good you will go to a far worse place.' Do you think that was----"

"Bed," said his mother and grandfather in one breath, and this time Frank recognized the voice of doom. Getting down from his chair he pressed his face with careless violence against his grandfather's naval beard and his mother's cheek, left the dining-room door ajar, came back in answer to his mother's call, shut it just as Freeman was going in with the coffee, and went upstairs clinging to the outer side of the banisters, as he had frequently been forbidden to do.

Left to themselves Admiral Palliser and his daughter drank their coffee in peace. Jane told her father about her visit to Mrs. Merivale; the Admiral engaged to speak to Mr. Adams on the following day. Then they did a little chilly gardening and so the evening passed.

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Sir Robert Fielding, Chancellor to the Diocese of Barchester, had a very handsome house in the Cathedral Close next to the Deanery, and before the war only made use of Hall's End, his charming little stone house in Hallbury, as a villegiatura, or as a convenient residence for his only child Anne who had perpetual chests and coughs and colds in Barchester; for the houses on the Deanery side of the close are very little above river level and for the greater part of the year have a tendency to damp, while a winter rarely passes without the river coming into the cellars. Indeed in the winter of 1939-40, as our readers will not remember (and we have had the greatest difficulty in running the reference to earth ourselves), rumour had it that the flood carried the Bishop's second-best gaiters as far as old Canon Thorne's front doorstep; and as the Bishop had accused the Canon, who was extremely popular, of Mariolatry, everyone hoped it was true.