CHAPTER II.
About four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs.Thornburgh's 'high tea,' that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, her spectacles on her nose, a large _couvre-pied_ over her knees, and the Whinborough newspaper on her lap.

The neighborhood of this last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading; but in reality the energies of her house-wifely mind were taken up with quite other things.

The vicar's wife was plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest.

All her _solid_ preparations for the evening were over, and in her own mind she decided that with them there was no possible fault to be found.
The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work in a spirit at once lavish and fastidious, breathed into her by her mistress.

No better tongue, no plumper chickens, than those which would grace her board to-night were to be found, so Mrs.Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district.