shape of good food, clean linen, mended socks, and such like, without
any blossom of sweet intercourse to make life pleasant.

Aunt Ann would have been quite justified in looking on poetry with
contempt had it been what she imagined it. Like many others, she had
decided opinions concerning things of which her idea nowise corresponded
with the things themselves.




CHAPTER II.


THE ARBOR.

While the elders thus conversed in the dusky drawing-room, where the
smell of the old roses almost overpowered that of the new, another
couple sat in a little homely bower in the garden. It was Walter and his
rather distant cousin, Molly Wentworth, who for fifteen years had been
as brother and sister. Their fathers had been great friends, and when
Molly's died in India, and her mother speedily followed him, Richard
Colman took the little orphan, who was at the time with a nurse in
England, home to his house, much to the joy of his wife, who had often
longed for a daughter to perfect the family idea. The more motherly a
woman is, the nearer will the child of another satisfy the necessities
of her motherhood. Mrs. Colman could not have said which child she loved
best.

Over the still summer garden rested a weight of peace. It was a night to