opinion. However, he's got some good rum; but I don't want to be hand
and glove with him, for all that."

It was this kind of dim suspicion which beclouded the view of Mr.
Freely's qualities in the maturer minds of Grimworth through the early
months of his residence there. But when the confectioner ceased to be a
novelty, the suspicions also ceased to be novel, and people got tired of
hinting at them, especially as they seemed to be refuted by his advancing
prosperity and importance. Mr. Freely was becoming a person of influence
in the parish; he was found useful as an overseer of the poor, having
great firmness in enduring other people's pain, which firmness, he said,
was due to his great benevolence; he always did what was good for people
in the end. Mr. Chaloner had even selected him as clergyman's
churchwarden, for he was a very handy man, and much more of Mr.
Chaloner's opinion in everything about church business than the older
parishioners. Mr. Freely was a very regular churchman, but at the Oyster
Club he was sometimes a little free in his conversation, more than
hinting at a life of Sultanic self-indulgence which he had passed in the
West Indies, shaking his head now and then and smiling rather bitterly,
as men are wont to do when they intimate that they have become a little
too wise to be instructed about a world which has long been flat and
stale to them.

For some time he was quite general in his attentions to the fair sex,
combining the gallantries of a lady's man with a severity of criticism on
the person and manners of absent belles, which tended rather to stimulate
in the feminine breast the desire to conquer the approval of so
fastidious a judge. Nothing short of the very best in the department of
female charms and virtues could suffice to kindle the ardour of Mr.
Edward Freely, who had become familiar with the most luxuriant and