Miss Monro was a little annoyed at this faint clerical joke; Ellinor smiled quietly.

Miss Monro disapproved of Ellinor's grave ways and sober severe style of dress.
"You may be as good as you like, my dear, and yet go dressed in some pretty colour, instead of those perpetual blacks and greys, and then there would be no need for me to be perpetually telling people you are only four-and-thirty (and they don't believe me, though I tell them so till I am black in the face).

Or, if you would but wear a decent-shaped bonnet, instead of always wearing those of the poky shape in fashion when you were seventeen." The old canon died, and some one was to be appointed in his stead.

These clerical preferments and appointments were the all-important interests to the inhabitants of the Close, and the discussion of probabilities came up invariably if any two met together, in street or house, or even in the very cathedral itself.

At length it was settled, and announced by the higher powers.