were poor, and that his father was a clergyman attached to the parish
church. As a matter of fact, the Reverend Samuel Raymond was senior
curate there, with a stipend of ninety-five pounds a year. Born at
Tewkesbury, the son of a miller, he had won his way to a servitorship
at Christ Church, Oxford; and somehow, in the course of one Long
Vacation, had found money for travelling expenses to join a reading
party under the Junior Censor. The party spent six summer weeks at a
farmhouse near Honiton, in Devon. The farm belonged to an invalid
widow named Venning, who let it be managed by her daughter Humility
and two paid labourers, while she herself sat by the window in her
kitchen parlour, busied incessantly with lace-work of that beautiful
kind for which Honiton is famous. He was an unassuming youth; and
although in those days servitors were no longer called upon to black
the boots of richer undergraduates, the widow and her daughter soon
divined that he was lowlier than the others, and his position an
awkward one, and were kind to him in small ways, and grew to like
him. Next year, at their invitation, he travelled down to Honiton
alone, with a box of books; and, at twenty-two, having taken his
degree, he paid them a third visit, and asked Humility to be his
wife. At twenty-four, soon after his admission to deacon's orders,
they were married. The widow sold the small farm, with its stock,
and followed to live with them in the friary gate-house; this having
been part of Humility's bargain with her lover, if the word can be
used of a pact between two hearts so fond.

About ten years had gone since these things happened, and their child
Taffy was now past his eighth birthday.

It seemed to him that, so far back as he could remember, his mother
and grandmother had been making lace continually. At night, when his