clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-comfort at the fall of his
senior's principles, had, on coming home, told her laughingly all the
story of the morning. Perhaps one should be a woman and a Friend to
enter into her feelings. She was tied by a promise and by a sense of
personal pledge to a low and disgraced man, and then coming to love
another despite herself she had grown greatly to honor him. She might
reason as she would that only a sense of right and a yearning for the
fullness of a righteous life had made him give up his profession and
fellows and turn aside to follow the harder creed of Fox, but she well
knew with a woman's keenness of view that she herself had gone for
something in this change; and now, as sometimes before, she reproached
herself with his failures. As we came in she hastily dried her eyes and
went out of the room. At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon
there was a scene of which I came to know all a good while later.

Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work when Mr. Wholesome, who
had lingered behind, strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden.
There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress White, very pretty,
with her long fair fingers clasped over a book which lay face down on
her lap. Presently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking to and fro
and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, then, as yet in England, called a
churchwarden. These were two more than commonly good-looking persons,
come of sturdy English breeds, fined down by that in this climate which
has taken the coarseness of line and feature out of so many of our
broods, and has made more than one English painter regret that the
Vandyke faces had crossed the ocean to return no more.

Schmidt and I looked out a moment into the long vista where, between the
rose-boughs bending from either wall under the apricot, we could see the
gray silvery shimmer of the woman's dress, and beyond it, passing to and