The festal tea had begun and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite to her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's wife. Poor Mrs. Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered the room on the arm of Mr. Mayhew, the incumbent of the neighboring valley of Shanmoor, that the first _coup d'æil_ was good. The flowers had been arranged in the afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again; a pleasing odor of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and fern; and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses and bright faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant play of crisp and delicate color.
But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with a little sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of an eye-glass at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a large and jewelled hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled round the table, lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited consciousness, on every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_ should have been and was not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to restrain herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew, giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the meal which did but confirm her neighbor--a grim uncommunicative person--in his own devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr. Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some opening into the great world should be discovered for him.
Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon, her slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious glances at the Thornburgh's guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'