things."

"I do, Hilary, when they are the only ones within reach."

The girl moved restlessly, settling her hammock cushions; then she lay
looking out over the sunny garden with discontented eyes.

It was a large old-fashioned garden, separated on the further side by a
low hedge from the old ivy-covered church. On the back steps of the
church, Sextoness Jane was shaking out her duster. She was old and
gray and insignificant looking; her duties as sexton, in which she had
succeeded her father, were her great delight. The will with which she
sang and worked now seemed to have in it something of reproach for the
girl stretched out idly in the hammock. Nothing more than half-way
things, and not too many of those, had ever come Sextoness Jane's way.
Yet she was singing now over her work.

Hilary moved impatiently, turning her back on the garden and the bent
old figure moving about in the church beyond; but, somehow, she
couldn't turn her back on what that bent old figure had suddenly come
to stand for.

Fifteen minutes later, she sat up, pushing herself slowly back and
forth. "I wish Jane had chosen any other morning to clean the church
in, Mother Shaw!" she protested with spirit.

Her mother looked up from her mending. "Why, dear? It is her regular
day."

"Couldn't she do it, I wonder, on an irregular day! Anyhow, if she