life. She spoke of the deserts of the Abruzzi, the solitudes of Otranto, and the ruins of Poestum, as if she had traced all the footsteps of the friendless artist. Here is a bit of colour for you." My father took from his cupboard a rough study and held it proudly in the fading evening light. "She ought to devote her life to art," said my father, as if talking to himself; "she would regenerate landscape-painting. There is nothing like her work. She has a tone and colour peculiarly her own. I teach her nothing. She catches the inspiration of a scene in a moment-morning, noon, twilight, the very taste of the atmosphere is in her pictures. They are poems; they set you dreaming. The name of Ruth Oswald should be inscribed on the roll of fame, and here is a selfish young fellow insisting upon having it written down in the parish register with a thousand nonentities whom nobody ever heard of before or will ever hear of again." I was too happy and self-satisfied to feel this sparkle of the paternal sarcasm. "No, I don't mean that," said my father, replacing the picture; "I don't mean exactly that, George; but you must not encourage her to lay aside her art, as she surely will do unless you interfere. She is one of those conscientious creatures who think of duty before anything, who, in marrying, would convince herself that her duty was to be continually thinking of her husband and her household affairs. I knew a lady who made a great name as a poet, and yet she confessed to me that she would rather have sat at the head of a table with half a dozen children round it, the mistress of a happy home, fulfilling woman's only mission. Woman is a mystery, George, an unfathomable mystery. It is no good trying to understand her. There was your poor mother, for example. So far as mental ability went, and goodness of heart, which is better than mental ability, she was my superior; and yet it was the constant idea of her life that my marriage with her had been to my detriment. She would have that it had pulled me down in life; that I ought to have had a woman who could have understood me and appreciated my genius. My genius, poor dear soul! And if it is possible for one human being to understand another, she understood me; heaven rest her!" It had never occurred to me until that night what a lonely life my father's had been for many years. I pitied him when I thought of my own coming happiness. I said "My coming happiness" to myself, but only for a moment. Doubt and fear succeeded the sudden revelation of hope. She had not confessed her love for me; nor had I dared do more than look into her eyes and press her hand. This conversation between my father and the Dean might have no real significance. Now that happiness seemed to have come within my grasp, a sudden fear of misery took possession of me. I could not lose her now for worlds. I pictured her sitting at my fireside in my own home-some pretty cottage furnished under her own eye, with her dear pictures on the walls. I placed the cottage on the banks of a river, with trees waving over the roof. I could almost hear the rustling of her dress. And I hear it now, looking back into the past, as I then looked into the future. Yes, I hear the music of her presence in the room as I sit at my desk, haunted with the one dear memory of my life. "And Memory, too, with her dreams shall come- Dreams of a former happier day- When heaven was still the Spirit's home, And her wings had not yet fallen away; 'Glimpses of glory ne'er forgot, That tell like gleams on a sunset sea, What once hath been, what now is not, CHAPTER X. BETWEEN THE LIGHTS. TWILIGHT and moonlight. Let us sit in the shadow and see the day melt into night. There come to me bright images and pathetic memories between the lights. They rise up out of the misty vapours and stand before me as did the visions that appeared to holy men in the days of the prophets; only that mine are familiar ghosts. I fear them not. They are no spirits to awe and command, but only the blossoms of thought and memory, only the friends of former days; they come to me in the twilight, just as the poppy odours of Somnus are stealing over the valley. They come when the first faint glint of the moon falls upon the retreating day. The trailing garments of the twilight hour sweep past me, and the breeze fans my soul into a wakefulness of memory. The old times come back, the old faces, the old memories, fresh and familiar as they were when I was of them, and when she was of the earth, an angel among mortals, an angel in black silk and a lace shawl. Let us sit in the twilight and be familiar and friendly in our conversation, dismissing Somnus and his poppies for the moment, and coming down to the level of Mr. Molineau and Mrs. Stamford. It seemed to me at the first blush of the meeting that the dinner party at the Dean's had been followed by breakfast and this happy river journey, though years had intervened. One often counts time by events. That first dinner-party, and this pic-nic on the river, were two incidents in my association with the Dean's family which I remember most distinctly, and in these two acts in the drama of my early life the same persons took part. If the conversation had been taken up where I left it at the dinner-party, it would have appeared quite natural. "It is indeed a lovely morning-lovely morning, Mister Dean," said the Rev. Canon Molineau, as the barge slipped from its moorings, and floated down the river. 66 "Yes; oh, I see now," remarked Mrs. Stamford, the thin widow of a once fat pastor of two fat livings; we are drawn along by a horse. I wondered how we were going to be propelled-how very interesting." "Very-yes, very," said the Canon; "I think I like the autumn better than any time of the year-any time of the year." "I have no choice for my part," said Mr. Pensax, to whom the Canon looked for an answer; "it is all one to me." Mr. Pensax conveyed most distinctly that whatever the season was he should be run down and scouted by the world. "You are of an accommodating nature, Mr. Pensax," said the Canon, with his blandest smile; "an accommodating nature," echoing back mysteriously from beneath his formally-cut clerical vest. "Yes, yes; I adapt myself to circumstances; but the world is very ungrateful." "So it is," said Mrs. Stamford, who had been looking at the Canon so sweetly that Mr. Molineau must have felt a pang of remorse that he had not taken compassion on the lady long ago, and offered her a seat at the head of his table. If Wulstan may be believed, the Canon kept an excellent table, and gave genial roystering dinners to his bachelor friends. "Do you think so ?—well, really, I do not think the world is so bad after all-after all," said the Canon; "what do you say, Miss Oswald?” "The world, Mr. Canon Molineau, is what we make it," replied Miss Oswald promptly. "I agree with you, Mary," said the Dean in his rich unctuous voice ; we make our own world." "A chastening hand is sometimes laid upon us, Mr. Dean, when we think we have made our world and filled it with happiness,” observed my father, who was thinking of the tombstone we had passed on our way. "That is when we are forgetful of Him who made us. This is one of the besetting sins of the age and its discoveries. In our scientific investigations we are prone to forget Him; we try to account for everything without Him. And this is the great difficulty and danger of our lives." "A very good sermon in a few words, Mister Dean; very good indeed," said the Canon. "And enough for to-day," the Dean replied cheerfully; "we parsons, Mr. Himbleton, have a habit of preaching. If you find me drifting in that direction again to-day remind me that there is a time for everything." We were sitting beneath an awning in the centre of the ecclesiastical barge. Let me describe the picture as it comes up before me, subdued by the mist of years which has gathered about it. The Dean is the most imposing figure in the group, a tall, white-haired, florid-complexioned ecclesiastic, in his clerical hat and gaiters. On a low cushioned chair near his feet is seated Ruth Oswald, in a limp, clinging black silk dress with a short waist. She wears round her shoulders a white lace shawl, and thin, gauzy gauntlets partly cover her round white arms. Her hair hangs down her shoulders in a dark cluster of curls. There is a red rose in her hat, which brings out the olive hue of her cheeks, while the diamond in her shawl (negligently pinned at the throat) does not sparkle more brightly than her eyes. Behind her stands Mr. Erasmus Pensax, with his large hands and feet and his melancholy face, a contrast to Mr. Canon Molineau, his neighbour, all smiles and radiance, with bright eyes, and white teeth, and dark hair and whiskers, tinged here and there with grey hairs. On the Dean's left hand is Miss Mary Oswald. She sits upright, and with her feet firmly planted on the deck, a living example of duty, beauty, and decision. She wears a white dress, bound with black riband, a black lace shawl, and a hat like her sister's, trimmed with white riband and tied under the chin. A dark blue rug has been thrown over a chair near her. The colour harmonises with her fair face and light brown hair. (She was a magnificent woman, Mary Oswald. My father, I am sure, was thinking so as he sat beside her, plying her with repartee.) Mrs. Stamford, in a black spencer and grey curls, reclines in an easy chair, alternately smiling her approval of the remarks of Mr. Molineau or trembling with fear lest Miss Oswald should say something rude to my father, for whom Mrs. Stamford had, she assured me, the highest respect and admiration. I see myself wandering in and out of this group, a young, slim fellow of three or four and twenty, with grey, sanguine eyes and a somewhat shy, awkward gait. I see myself in these past days just as I see the boat, the river, and the landscape, a thing apart from the Curate of Summerdale. I am a reminiscence. I am to myself just now like the book-hero of a story. I seem to look back upon some dear friends of my youth, a boy and a girl, two pure, hopeful souls, unstained by the world's greed and traffic, glowing with youth, full of nobility of thought. I see the barge gliding through the meadows. Now and then the lazy horse stops to crop some herbage by the way, and then the rope splashes in the stream, making a long silver line in the river. I look down into the waters, and I see another barge there, floating along with white clouds and moving banks of reeds, and trees, and cornfields, and green pastures, and hop-yards. I see flocks of birds flitting hither and thither, enjoying their short vacation. All the spring and summer they have been building their nests and rearing their young. They feed upon the autumn grain and berries, and come and go in holiday throngs. Coveys of partridges start up with a whirr as the barge turns the bend of some quiet nook. They little think how near are the September guns. Like that happy group on board the barge, they dream not how close at hand is death and destruction and misery. What a glorious panorama is that slide out of memory's lantern! Hedge-rows, red and yellow with hips and haws; old timbered houses, with swallows sitting on the roofs, in rows, discussing their coming journey; long avenues of hops, like dreams of classic vineyards; fields full of lowing cattle; great yellow patches of waving corn; ferrymen moving long flat-bottomed boats across the river; peasants looking from underneath their sunburnt brows at the gay barge; fishermen sitting among the tall grass; old churches slumbering among trees. These are the pictures that float by the deck of the barge to the music of a rippling tap-tap-tap at the bow of the vessel, and a responsive wash-wash-wash of back-water on the banks of the river where the moor-hen hides among the rushes. There was a great deal of learned talk at the Abbey, in which Miss Oswald took part. Ruth selected a mossy bank near the western window of the ruins for a study of elms and corn. While she made her sketch, the other members of the party rambled about the ruins in twos and threes. I contrived to stay with Ruth. My father purposely neglected his pupil, and nobody cared much for my society. Miss Oswald argued many knotty points of monkish policy and architectural economy with Mr. Molineau and my father. The Dean and Mr. Pensax walked arm in arm, now and then talking in a |