THE windows were all wide open, and a hot breeze of July, strong enough almost to be called a wind, and laden with the scents of summer and the hum of bees, poured boisterously into the room, stirring the papers on the table and ruffling the grayish wiry hair of the writer. But this invasion of the wind was clearly a thing often experienced, and, though apparently welcomed, suitably guarded against, for the copious papers that fluttered and rustled so busily to its touch were made secure from disarrangement by stones and various small fragments that were placed on top of their orderly heaps in order to prevent their taking flight. Thus, at the right hand of the writer, on a little shelf of these flutterers bound together by an elastic band and neatly docketed “Parish Accounts,” there stood a small piece of basaltic rock, with a paper label gummed to it, lettered in minute old English type, “Ye Sea of Galilee, 1902.” “Ye Dead Sea, 1902,” a softer piece of pumice-stone, prevented “Household Accounts (Stables)” from sowing themselves over the room; while a larger slab of white marble—lay-brother, so to speak, to the first two, and labelled “Acropolis, 1902” in Greek characters—kept the very small packet of “Letters unanswered” in place; and a fragment, with its ticket “St. Peter’s, Rome,” not stating, however, from what part of the church it had been pilfered, kept Barr’s last list of “Seeds for the Flower Garden” from going there. Bits of Jerusalem and Nazareth were similarly useful.

The room was large, square, and commodious; lived in, as was evident from a first glance, by some one who knew what he wanted in his study, and put all things in their places; while a glance at his rather keen and severe face might suggest that he had a slight tendency to put people in their places also. There was nothing fortuitous or haphazard about his arrangements; one felt instinctively that the owner kept about him only such things as were in constant use, as, for instance, Barr’s catalogue of seeds or that formed part of the constant background of his mind, under which head we may class a terra-cotta reproduction of Michael Angelo’s Moses, that stood on the top of a revolving bookcase in the window, and a framed map of the Roman Forum (1904), with the latest excavations outlined in red. Bookshelves took up the bulk of the wall-space, which was otherwise decorated with prints of a Biblical character. The floor was covered with red carpet, cut up by black lines into lozenge-shaped squares, in the centre of each of which was a fleur-de-lis, and it, like the prints and the weights that kept papers in their places, had a serious and slightly ecclesiastical suggestion about it. But just as nobody in this world is entirely cut out of one piece, but is, to some extent, at any rate, of the nature of patchwork, so too this room reflected a few slightly lighter characteristics. A couple of golf balls, for instance, stood on the chimney-piece just below the Sistine Madonna, bearing the marks of strenuous if slightly misdirected usage, and in the centre of it was a pipe-rack, with half a dozen well-coloured companions of the mouth in it. Here again ecclesiasticism a little reasserted itself, for the rack was of fumed oak, carved in a debased Gothic manner to represent a church window. A very bulky and much-wadded sofa, of the type inexplicably known as “Chesterfield,” denoted that there were moments in which the flesh might be tired if not weak, while even there the eye—unless closed—would, wherever it looked, be braced by the contemplation of mottoes printed in large and very legible type. They were all most suitable, and a baby in arms could have seen their applicability. Thus on the jamb of each of the bookcases was a printed scroll, “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” while on the pipe-rack, humorously enough, though perhaps slightly incongruously, since it crossed the sill of the Gothic church window, was written the quaintly altered quotation, “The earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye”; a calendar on the table was somewhat more prosaically inscribed “Pereunt et imputantur,” and also “Days and moments quickly flying”; and across the gold frame of the Sistine Madonna—again making up in suitability what it lacked in ingenuity—was printed “Gloria in Excelsis.” A slightly wider flight of fancy, however, was exhibited on the varnished wooden rim of the writing-table itself, for here, in three-inch letters, was carved, “My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”

At this moment the truth and literal applicability of the text was not quite being fulfilled. Leaving his tongue out of the question, the writer was ready and his pen was ready, but the pen was poised, and the writer was not writing. He had, in fact, got to the last paragraph of the address he was going to give at the Mannington Literary and Scientific Club, or, as Canon Alington playfully called it, “The Literific,” on Tuesday evening next, on the very suggestive and interesting subject “The True Test of Literary and Artistic Immortality.” And the last paragraph he always held was the most important of all, for it was like the last well-directed hammer-blow that drives a nail-head flush with the board into which it has been tapped. In fact, several minutes before he had written on his blotting-paper in dotted lines, “C’est le dernier pas qui coÛte,” and had determined to have it put more permanently on to the inside margin of his blotting-book, so that it should always be before him when he was engaged in literary composition. He wanted a sounding conclusion, a last well-directed blow, and he sat there some five minutes without writing. Then he gave a little shake to his stylographic pen, and wrote:

Canon Alington paused a moment, wondering whether, strictly speaking, a thing could be proportionately immortal. But since the whole phrase expressed what he meant, he let it stand.

Canon Alington paused for a moment again, for he was not quite certain how this last very difficult word was spelled, being, though a scholar of dead languages, not so perfectly acquainted with the living. But a brief visit to the realms of gold, where he at once put his hand on a small German dictionary, relieved him from any anxiety on this score; there were two “m’s,” as he had thought. The fact that he had never seen the “Ring” did not prevent him from making this trenchant pronouncement on its ideals, for he had glanced not so long ago at a translation of it, which his brother-in-law, Hugh Grainger, had left in the house, which was more than enough to make him certain that he was not overstating the case, since, most unfortunately, he had opened it at that passage in the Valkyrie where Wotan, father of gods and men, enunciates such remarkable views on the subject of marriage.

But before returning to his table he took a pipe down from the Gothic window rack (it was by reason of its shape that he had chosen it from among twenty others), filled it, and lit it. Then he continued:

He inhaled a long breath of tobacco-smoke. Even if the sentence about Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” was a little “broad” for the Mannington “Literific,” this uncompromising condemnation of Wagner and Swinburne would show that, though he might be broad, he was also firm. The sentence was well-balanced too, the last hammer-taps were descending straight, and before proceeding he drew once or twice more at his pipe, for tobacco (he was afraid this was a weakness of the flesh, and meant to conquer it some day) always seemed to him to clarify his thought and aid his sense of literary composition. It was for this reason that, though he had tried giving up the use of it during last Lent, he had taken to it again after the third Sunday in that season, since he had thought, and his wife agreed with him, that his sermons suffered. This reason, though of the sort which the cynical tend to distrust, was indeed perfectly honest and genuine, and had not he thought that his sermons lost impressiveness, or had not Agnes shared his fear, he would have scorned to pamper the flesh in this manner; but since they did, it was a misdirected effort of asceticism to continue this particular form of abstinence. So instead he gave up for the remaining three weeks of Lent putting sugar in his tea, and in spite of the fact that he disliked this intensely—though, it is true, not quite so much as the abandonment of tobacco—he was quite firm about it, since nothing except a carnal appetite suffered.

Then, with the added inspiration of tobacco, he finished his peroration:

“Everlasting day,” said Canon Alington aloud, and repeated it again rather more sonorously. That was the last hammer-tap, and he drew a line across the paper, and dated it.

Canon Alington’s handwriting was neat to the point of exquisiteness, and since he was already quite certain of the correctness of his premises and the justice of his conclusions, it was but a short work to run through the finished paper again with an eye for punctuation and a detective’s keenness for any possible slips of grammar, for his horror of closed windows was outrivalled by his dread of split infinitives. His brown, lean face, with its thick crop of hair just beginning to turn gray, that rose upright in wiry fashion from his forehead, pointed to great physical vigour, while the fact that on this broiling day he had sat down directly after lunch and worked for more than three hours without rising from his chair, except at the end of his business to get that “earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye,” was sufficient indication that no mental weakness belied his appearance of strong vitality. He had written this paper, which would take him a full hour to read at the “Literific,” without notes of any kind, and without (as he found when he read it over) any of what he habitually called vain repetition, or (another critical term of his) “confused noises within.” All he had meant to say he had said, and, a rarer merit, he had said absolutely nothing that he did not mean to say. The whole paper gave as accurate a reflection of that which was in his mind as the best looking-glass.

He placed his sheets when he had finished their revision under a piece of labelled Sinaitic rock (1902), and then granted himself a few minutes’ leisure as he smoked the remainder of the pipe which had assisted him toward the composition of that uncompromising last paragraph. Though he had been busily engaged all day, first in parish business and then in this “literific” effort, he was not at all tired, and indeed the rest of the hours till bedtime were not without further duties. He had at present had no exercise all day, though he considered exercise to be as distinct a duty as any other, since the body reacts on the mind, and he purposed before dinner to do a little late seeding in the garden, and finish up very likely with half an hour with the heavy roller on the lawn. Then, too, he had long made it strictly incumbent upon himself to do an hour’s reading every day; not of the kind that was necessarily congenial to him, but reading which he felt it his duty to do in order to keep abreast of the times. Had he been a selfish, pleasure-loving person, he would certainly from preference have devoted this hour to some well-thumbed favourite, such as “Paradise Lost,” or Miss Corelli’s wonderful “Romance of Two Worlds.” But to be abreast with the times he always made a point of keeping on hand some novel dealing with affairs strictly of the present and its fashionable foibles and frailties. He learned from this how frivolous and unearnest London society was becoming, and could thus warn Mannington both by example and precept against the insidious infection. Mannington, indeed, especially in the summer months, he was afraid, was not altogether outside the danger-zone, and perhaps spent more time over garden-parties, strawberries, and scandal than was right. Not that Canon Alington was sour or Puritanical, or at all underrated the value of timely social gaieties; but to the unwary these things might tend to become an end in themselves, or, more dangerous yet, degenerate into that continuous and expensive round of pure pleasure, week in and week out, that seemed to characterise the season in London. But the clergy generally, he thought, did not make the most of their opportunities of usefulness by not keeping abreast of the times, and warning their flocks of the dangers that lurked beneath too great an indulgence of innocent and, indeed, helpful socialites, and also by too sad an aspect at tea-parties, or total abstention from them, which gave the impression that they thought such things wrong. Canon Alington never fell into these mistakes, and his wife’s fortnightly little dinners, which were distinguished for their plain yet excellent cooking, the soundness of the wines (though he was himself a teetotaller), and the sober strenuousness of the conversation, from which indeed scarcely any topic was barred, were quite a feature in Mannington society. The range of his guests, too, was extremely broad; one was liable to meet there “the military,” for Mannington was a garrison town; the “Close,” for it was a cathedral one; the “county” (for his wife was a Grainger and quite distinctly of the county), and many of the inhabitants of the detached houses with gardens that stretched their feelers into the country, such as The Firs, The Cedars, Apsley House, The Engadine, Holyrood, Holland House, and heaps of manors and granges. Nor was there any hint of religious disability in these parties; dissenting town councillors were entertained there, and Canon Alington never showed a shade of abated cordiality in his welcome of them, despite the great gulf that divided him from them. Indeed, there was a reputed atheist among his regular guests, who never went to any sort of church at all, and though there was wonder in the Canon’s flock when first it was known that Mr. Frawley had dined there (this, by the way, was common knowledge long before lunch-time next day), this broadness perhaps set Canon Alington on a higher pinnacle than ever. The text “all things to all men” was felt to be at last rightly understood. He also dined at the Frawleys’s, and had been asked to say grace, and did so. So Mr. Frawley, in his groping, purblind way, was broad, too.

To-night, too, the duties of the host would be his also, for his wife’s brother, Hugh Grainger, was coming to stop with them for a week-end of Friday till Tuesday, and though it cannot be said, without gross misuse of language, that he approved of Hugh, he could not help being somewhat stimulated by him, and occasionally in his quick, youthful way Hugh made remarks that the more mature and cultivated mind of Canon Alington found very suggestive. It was he, for instance, who had said that the “Rake’s Progress” was unsuitable to put up in a drawing-room because it was so intensely and violently moral; you might as well have gramophones shouting the Ten Commandments all day on a side-table; and though this remark was, of course, exaggerated and implied a certain flippancy that the Canon did not find at all to his taste, this had not prevented him from using the germ of truth which it contained in his recently-written paper for the “Literific.” Hugh also, in point of fact, had been the author of the little conceit about the earliest pipe, though it is only just to him to say that he had no idea this was to be or had been solemnly inscribed on the sill of the Gothic window of a pipe-rack. Yet Canon Alington had been more than half author of it, for he had quoted the original line of Tennyson to Hugh, who had merely said:

“Birdseye! Put it on your pipe-rack.”

Indeed, Hugh had not known where the original quotation came from, for with all his superficial quickness he seemed to his brother-in-law to have very little real knowledge, and the Canon often told him that what he needed was “deepening.”

His meditation over this half-pipe of tobacco lasted but a few minutes, for it was alien to his native activity of mind to indulge in vague reflections of any kind, and soon he took up the morning paper of the day, which, so busy had he been, he had not yet had time to look at. Outside he heard the crunch of the gravel of what is called the “carriage-sweep,” but it was probably not Hugh, who usually arrived only just before dinner-time; and if it was a caller, his wife was out, and he himself was never disturbed in his study for any chance visitor. Indeed, on the outside door of it he had playfully put up the motto, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” and the explanation of it often formed a pleasant little topic at his dinner-parties, when he and his men-guests crossed the hall to join the rest of the company in the drawing-room.

So he turned over the pages of his paper, secure from interruption. In the general way, there was not much to detain him, but in “London Day by Day” a short paragraph concerning the huge success of this new play, “Gambits,” arrested him, and he read it with some distress, remembering the original criticism of the drama that had appeared in the same paper, which had shown him so clearly that this play was typical of all those tendencies of the day which seemed to him so dangerous. For—such was the outline of the plot—a girl had been married young, far too young, in fact, to a man much older than herself, who, as Canon Alington easily saw, was a person of extreme feebleness and indecision of mind. Subsequently she fell in love with a young cousin of her husband who lived with them, and though there was no suggestion of infidelity on her part, yet it was clear that the author’s intention (one Andrew Robb, from the solid sound of which something better might have been expected) was that pity and sympathy should be extended to them both. It was only by degrees that the indecisive husband saw and realised this miserable state of affairs, and, after wretched vacillations, committed suicide. That, to put it baldly (and Canon Alington always put baldly affairs with which he felt no sympathy), was the skeleton of the play of which the Daily Telegraph had so warm and appreciative a critique. And now it appeared that London was going mad over the play, and pined to know who Andrew Robb was. But the Canon’s opinion of London had always been low. The very fact, too, that the play itself was said to be beautifully written, to be instinct with humanity and true pathos, made it all the more dangerous. In no single point were any of the tests of literary and artistic immortality, which he had laid down so convincingly in his paper of this afternoon, satisfied. A husband committed suicide because his wife had weakly allowed herself to fall in love with somebody else. There could not possibly be any germ of immortality in this hodge-podge of weakness and wickedness. Yet in the interval it looked as if it was going to live long and lustily. And it was called human! Frail and feeble as Canon Alington knew humanity, alas, to be, he did not think of it so badly as that!

At this point, however, his musings, set up again by that paragraph, were interrupted, for the carriage, the departing wheels of which had just again crunched the gravel, contained not callers, but Hugh, who had caught an earlier train. He crossed the grass to below the window of the study, put his hand on to the sill, and vaulted on to it, upsetting a small saucer of seeds which had been put there to soak before being planted.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve upset something. How are you, Dick?”

Dick, it must be confessed, had constantly to make little efforts of self-control when Hugh was in the house. He made them quite willingly, and was ashamed to think that they were efforts. He made one now.

“Ah, there you are, Hugh!” he said cordially. “How are you? What burglarious entry! And what’s the damage?”

“I seem to have upset some little beans,” said Hugh. “I sat down on half the saucer, so the rest tipped up.”

“Better than that you should tip up,” said his brother-in-law. “It was only some of those new lupins I was going to sow. All gone on the lawn, have they? It is of no consequence. Luckily I have some more, and I will put them to soak and sow them to-morrow instead. ‘That shall be to-morrow, not to-night.’ Rather neat, eh? Browning.”

Hugh gingerly but successfully accomplished the task of getting through the window into the room. Somehow, if his brother-in-law had said, “You clumsy brute, how beastly careless you are!” he would have felt less blamed than being not blamed at all in this Christian manner.

“And how’s Agnes?” he said, shaking hands.

“Very well, and as busy as we all are down here. She said she would very likely be late for tea, and told us not to wait.”

“I hope I haven’t interrupted you at—at anything,” said Hugh, unable for the moment to remember the names of things that made the Canon so busy.

“Not in the least. I had finished my paper, and perhaps you have saved me from the fate of idle hands. Shall we go out and have tea in the garden? It is cooler, I think, out of doors.”

“And there seems to be less of a gale out of doors than in your study,” remarked Hugh. “But you always like living in a Temple of the Winds.”

The Canon smiled approvingly; anything suggestive of a classical allusion always pleased him, though exactly how he would have reconciled his love for the classics with the view he had so pointedly expressed to-day that all art to be immortal must be religious would perhaps have puzzled him. But he had arrived at an age and a dignity which put him generally beyond the risk of being asked awkward questions. Hugh, however, sometimes asked things which his brother-in-law felt sure he would understand when he was older, and they occasionally had what the Canon called “great arguments” together.

“Ha! Temple of the Winds!” he said. “Hall of Æolus! Æolian hall. I’ll call the study Æolian Hall. Capital! I’m naming—or, rather, Agnes and I are naming all the rooms. It gives a house so much more character.”

They strolled out into the hall.

“Agnes thought of an excellent name to put on the baize door of the passage to the servants’ room,” he continued. “She suggested—in fact, she invented—the word ‘Abigailia,’ the country of the maid-servants, you see. Abigaildom was her first suggestion, but I proposed Abigailia on the analogy of Philistia. The whole idea, though, was hers. Come through the dining-room; we shall go out without being seen from the front if anybody calls. And they will truthfully say that we are all out.”

They passed accordingly through the dining-room, where the blinds were down to keep out the afternoon sun, and the table-cloth already laid for dinner glimmered whitely in the dusk. It was not, however, so dark that Hugh could not read over the chimney-piece, in Roman characters, “They sat down to eat and drink,” while over the door into the garden was the appropriate conclusion, “And rose up to play.”

“And you have been in London all these last three months, have you not?” he went on. “Busy, I suppose, or at any rate occupied? Agnes was very neat on the subject the other day. She said, ‘In town they seem to make a business of pleasure, whereas here I am sure we make a pleasure of business.’ Like all true wit, too, it contains a profound truth.”

This true wit, however, did not inspire Hugh with any fresh thoughts on the subject, and he changed the subject with some abruptness.

“Oh, yes, one is always occupied in London!” he said. “By the way, do you know if Mrs. Allbutt is down here? You know her, don’t you? Which is her house? I have not been down since she moved here.”

Dick Alington’s face grew slightly reserved.

“Yes, she has taken Friars Grange,” he said; “the house by the river. She has, however, called it Chalkpits, which she tells me is its real name on the old leases. A pity, I think, rather. Of course, I should be the last to decry the spirit of antiquarian exactitude, but it is possible to lose the sense of romance in what is after all mere pedantry.”

“Oh, I think I feel with her!” said Hugh. “Every retired grocer lives in a grange.”

But the slight reserve that had come over the Canon at the mention of Mrs. Allbutt was not due to pedantry. The real reason appeared now.

“She was here, anyhow, last Sunday,” he said, “because she asked Agnes and me to dine with her in the evening. We both thought it a very odd thing to do. We declined, of course.”

“Why?” asked Hugh rather thoughtlessly. Then, so he flattered himself, he remembered. “Oh, I see, evening church!” he said.

His brother-in-law again stiffened slightly, but replied with the most scrupulous honesty.

“No, we should have had time to go after church,” he said, “had we wished. Indeed, Agnes guessed that the dinner was at the unusually late hour of half-past eight to enable us to do so. But it is against our principles to dine out Sunday.”

Canon Alington, who seldom moved about his garden without a spud in his hand, neatly extracted a dandelion from the short velvet of the lawn, and relaxed a little.

“Of course, I do not say that it is morally wrong to dine out on Sunday,” he said, “because that would be a narrow view of which, I trust, I should not be guilty. It is, of course, also quite possible that as Mrs. Allbutt has only been here so short a time she did not know our views on the subject, for I am aware that many of the clergy do not agree with me in my idea of the observance of Sunday. But let that pass. I hope Mrs. Allbutt will be an acquisition to the parish.”

“She would be an acquisition to any parish,” said Hugh. “She is quite entirely charming. During the last fortnight I have often met her at Lady Rye’s.”

Canon Alington warmed to this.

“Ah, there is an admirable woman!” he said. “She has a truly serious sense of the responsibility which wealth and position give. If Mrs. Allbutt is like her, we are indeed fortunate. And certainly Agnes is favourably impressed with her, and Agnes’s impressions are not often erroneous. She has been very handsome in the way of subscriptions already.”

“She is also very handsome in the way of features,” said Hugh, with a touch of flippancy.

The planting of the lupin-seeds which Hugh had upset was to have been part of what Canon Alington called the horticultural curriculum for the evening, and since that was no longer possible, gardening operations were deferred in toto till the morrow, and the two walked over to the adjoining golf links to play a short round before dinner. As he had often done before, Canon Alington, having spun a coin to decide who should drive first, asked Hugh if he would have “capita aut caudÆ,” and Hugh, having won, had the bright thought of replying “Habeo honorem.” Dick, however, demurred to this as being an improper use of the Latin word “honor,” which meant not “honour,” but “public office.”

Agnes Alington was older than Hugh by several years. She had married young, at the age of eighteen, when a girl’s character, so to speak, is in the state of an ingot of red-hot iron, fresh taken from the furnace, and easily and glowingly to be fashioned into any shape that her blacksmith desires. The blacksmith in this case being Canon Alington, it was not difficult to forecast that in a very short space of time she would be hammered into a shape on which the author had stamped his own very distinct and efficient personality, and be, so to speak, hall-marked with him. This formation of his wife’s mind, a task which Dick had definitely set himself and earnestly carried out, was very soon accomplished, with the result, as might have been expected, that Agnes became extraordinarily like him. This too had happened, that as she became more like him he began to admire her more and more for all those qualities which under his tuition sprang up like rather stiff flowers in her character. He had exactly the same qualities himself, but in his busy and strenuous life he had no time to admire them in himself, nor sufficient self-consciousness to think about them at all except in as far as the deeds they dictated were his duty. But somehow when he saw them so brilliant and vigorous in his wife, the ordinary human love, under direction of which he had wooed and won her, became a very steadfast and solid thing, founded (though the foundation had been added afterward) on the granite of imperishable esteem and respect. In all points, indeed, the welding bore the trace of the hammerer’s characteristics, and in a quality so personal and essential, one would have said, as that of humour Agnes now completely resembled her husband, though at the time of her marriage she was quite capable, like her brother, of telling fairy-tales to children out of her own head. But to-day the light side of things was sufficiently represented in her life if from time to time she could strike out some idea akin to that under inspiration of which she had suggested “Abigaildom” for the baize door of the passage leading to the maidservants’ rooms. She had become an ideal helpmeet for him and she truly and without exaggeration expressed what he was to her in a pet name for him, which was Galahad, again often abbreviated into the nom de foyer of Laddie. Rarely, indeed does it happen that two people are so thoroughly and essentially suited to each other as these were, and in all the difficulties and perplexities no less than in all the happiness and joys of their excellent and admirable lives they were truly one. And the seed of this thoroughly happy marriage was set in their two children, who had neither of them ever given their parents a single moment of anxiety, except as regards their eyesight, which necessitated their both wearing spectacles. These were a boy and girl, now aged nine and eight respectively. Their names were Ambrose and Perpetua, the calendar saints of the days on which they had been born.

Perpetua on the occasion of Hugh’s visit happened to be away from home, staying with an aunt by the seaside for a week, but when the two men came back from their golf they found Ambrose walking by himself up and down the gravel path of the kitchen garden, and he ran to meet them. Hugh, though in general fond of children, was terrified of Ambrose because of his stainless character and his consciousness of virtue.

“How are you, Uncle Hugh?” said Ambrose very properly. “Mamma told me you were coming to-day, and I was so pleased!”

“Why, that’s awfully jolly of you,” said Hugh. “And where’s Perpetua?”

“She is staying with Aunt Susan. I made a calendar of the days when she would be away, and I cross one off every evening. Don’t I, papa?”

“Yes, my son. Is your mother in?”

“Oh, yes, we came in together about half an hour ago! We went to see a poor woman who is ill, and I took her some strawberries. They were my own, from my own garden. I carried them in a cabbage-leaf.”

“Strawberries?” said Hugh. “How delicious! Let’s go and eat some. I haven’t had any strawberries since—since lunch.”

Ambrose’s face gleamed with pleasure.

“That would be nice,” he said, “but those were my strawberry ration for to-day. My ration is a baker’s dozen of strawberries, which is thirteen, you know.”

Hugh’s face fell.

“I see,” he said, “I suppose I’ve had my ration, too. Besides, I expect it’s time for me to dress for dinner.”

“Then I shall come in, too. I come down to dinner now, Uncle Hugh. At least, I sit with papa and mamma while they have theirs, until it strikes eight.”

The boy ran on in front of them, leaving his father and Hugh behind.

“The two children are devoted to each other,” said their father. “And they vie with each other in kindly deeds. The boy gave all his strawberries for the day to the sick woman. It was entirely his own idea, too; he asked me if he might.”

“I should have told him not to jaw, but eat them himself,” said Hugh, in a sudden access of internal revolt.

Canon Alington looked at him a moment in silence.

“I fancy it is time for us to dress,” he said tactfully.