any of them. The rector did not understand the game, he said, and it was
perhaps to learn that he watched every play so closely. Lois, of course,
had no part in it, for Mrs. Dale was always ready to take a hand, if one
of the usual four failed. Mrs. Dale was too impatient to play whist from
choice, but she enjoyed the consciousness of doing a favor.

Lois's only occupation was to be useful. Ashurst was strangely behind the
times in thinking that it was a privilege, as it ought to be a pleasure,
for young people to wait upon their elders and betters.

True, Mr. Denner, with old-fashioned politeness, always offered his
services when Lois went for the wine and cake at close of the rubber; but
the little gentleman would have been conscious of distinct surprise had
she accepted them, for Lois, in his eyes, was still a little girl. This
was perhaps because Mr. Denner, at sixty-two, did not realize that he had
ceased to be, as he would have expressed it, "a gentleman in middle
life." He had no landmarks of great emotions to show him how far the
sleepy years had carried him from his youth; and life in Ashurst was very
placid. There were no cases to try; property rarely went out of families
which had held it when Mr. Denner's father wrote their wills and drew up
their deeds in the same brick office which his son occupied now, and it
was a point of decency and honor that wills should not be disputed.

Yet Mr. Denner felt that his life was full of occupation. He had his
practicing in the dim organ-loft of St. Michael's and All Angels; and
every day when dinner was over, his little nephew slipped from his chair,
and stood with his hands behind him to recite his _rego regere_; then
there were always his flies and rods to keep in order against the season
when he and the rector started on long fishing tramps; and in the
evenings, when Willie had gone to bed, and his cook was reading "The