She said: ‘Would you take this bit of parchment.… I got a little Jew girl to write on it in Hebrew: It’s “God bless you and keep you: God watch over you at your goings out and at …” ’ He tucked it into his breast pocket. ‘The talismanic passage,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll wear it.…

there are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard

So she had looked in on Mark, reading his correspondence with his copy of The Times airing on a chair-back before the fire - for he was just the man to retain the eighteen-forty idea that you can catch cold by reading a damp newspaper.