their deep-set doors, their gleaming old-fashioned knockers, spoke
eloquently of the day when the great Jane's Elizabeths and D'Arcys, Mrs.
Morrises and Misses Bates found the world in a tea-cup, when passions were
solved by matrimony and ambitions by the possession of a carriage and a
fine pair of bays. But more than this was the way that the gardens and
lawns and orchards ran unchecked in and out, up and down, here breaking
into the street, there crowding a church with apple-trees, seeming to
speak, at every step, of leisure and sunny days and lives free of care.

Ronder had never seen anything so pretty; something seemed to tell him
that he would never see anything so pretty again.

Ryle was not a good conversationalist, because he had always before him
the fear that some one might twist what he said into something really
unpleasant, but, indeed, he found Ronder so agreeable that, as he told
Mrs. Ryle when he got home, he "never noticed the hill at all."

"I hope you won't think me impertinent," said Ronder, "but I must tell you
how charmed I was with the way that you sang the service on Sunday. You
must have been complimented often enough before, but a stranger always has
the right, I think, to say something. I'm a little critical, too, of that
kind of thing, although, of course, an amateur...but--well, it was
delightful."

Ryle flushed with pleasure to the very tips of his over-large ears.

"Oh, really, Canon...But indeed I hardly know what to say. You're too
good. I do my poor best, but I can't help feeling that there is danger of
one's becoming stale. I've been here a great many years now and I think
some one fresh...."