shoulders in a knowing knapsack fashion.

The two young people had known one another all their lives, for
Gerard was the son of a medical man who had lived next door to Miss
Headworth when the children were young. The father was dead, and the
family had left the place, but this son had remained at school, and
afterwards had been put into the office at the umbrella factory under
charge of Mr. Dutton, whose godson he was, and who treated him as a
nephew. He was a good-hearted, steady young fellow, with his whole
interest in ecclesiastical details, wearing a tie in accordance with
'the colours,' and absorbed in church music and decorations, while
his recreations were almost all in accordance therewith.

There was plenty of merriment, as he drew and measured at the very
scanty ruins, which were little more than a few fragments of wall,
overgrown luxuriantly with ivy and clematis, but enclosing some fine
old coffin-lids with floriated crosses, interesting to those who
cared for architecture and church history, as Mr. Dutton tried to
make the children do, so that their ecclesiastical feelings might be
less narrow, and stand on a surer foundation than present interest, a
slightly aggressive feeling of contempt for all the other town
churches, and a pleasing sense of being persecuted.

They fought over the floriations and mouldings with great zest, and
each maintained a date with youthful vigour--both being, as Mr.
Dutton by and by showed them, long before the foundation. The pond
had been left to the last with a view to the wellbeing of the water-
soldier on the return. Here the difficulties of the capture were
great, for the nearest plant flourished too far from the bank to be
reached with comfort, and besides, the sharp-pointed leaves to which