philosophy, or even curiosity? As for any influence from the public
offices of religion, a contented soul may glide through them all for
a long life, unstruck to the last, buoyant and evasive as a bee
amongst hailstones. And now her cousin, unsolicited, was about to
assume, if she should permit him, the unspiritual direction of her
being, so that she need never be troubled from the quarter of the
unknown.

Mrs. Ramshorn's house had formerly been the manor-house, and,
although it now stood in an old street, with only a few yards of
ground between it and the road, it had a large and ancient garden
behind it. A large garden of any sort is valuable, but an ancient
garden is invaluable, and this one had retained a very antique
loveliness. The quaint memorials of its history lived on into the
new, changed, unsympathetic time, and stood there, aged, modest, and
unabashed. Yet not one of the family had ever cared for it on the
ground of its old-fashionedness; its preservation was owing merely
to the fact that their gardener was blessed with a wholesome
stupidity rendering him incapable of unlearning what his father, who
had been gardener there before him, had had marvellous difficulty in
teaching him. We do not half appreciate the benefits to the race
that spring from honest dulness. The CLEVER people are the ruin of
everything.

Into this garden, Bascombe walked the next morning, after breakfast,
and Helen, who, next to the smell of a fir-wood fire, honestly liked
the odour of a good cigar, spying him from her balcony, which was
the roof of the veranda, where she was trimming the few remaining
chrysanthemums that stood outside the window of her room, ran down
the little wooden stair that led from it to the garden, and joined