evident her nose’s amelioration. “It is well to have the gift of idealization, Austin—it makes life far more comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?” The irony of her tone was not easy.

“One moment, Kate.” Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter’s shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. “Do you see that quite delightful effect—that group of trees melting against the sky—“ It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom Mrs. Merrick had never heard. “He could do it; it’s like one of his smiling bits.” His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, “I am rather busy just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing—German idealism; what caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, the unpleasant sun;—I can’t leave just now.”

“But a holiday would do you good.” Mrs. Merrick was forced to some urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to feel that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these sourly suave contests without being made to feel that she was receiving one. Indeed, her odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude, his disdain, and his pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure she could not afford to miss from her parties—parties often so painfully scraped together—painfully commonplace when scraped. This year her party was surprisingly significant, but even in its midst Austin would count well as her appendage—would certainly redeem her from her husband’s heavy conformity, that simply counted for nothing. He impressed her, and she imagined that he must impress other people.

“I have a really interesting group,” she said, and she recited the list, adding, “Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so suggestive—“ Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia.

“Jones? Ah, yes,” Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity.

“A clever man, you know.”

“Not bad,” Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity. “That little book of his on Comte wasn’t half bad; you remember it, Felicia?”

Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added discomfiture. “You will come, then?” She gathered up her reins.

“May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow, and I will join you as soon as may be.” His face had regained its full serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession.

When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her digging. Her father stood in the path watching her.

“Could one of Spenser’s heroines be imagined digging?” he mused. “The day, the flowers—you among them—bring Spenser to my mind.”

“I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand to do,” said Felicia. “But I am not a Britomart type.”

“And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;—an indolent, unroused Britomart. But I don’t see you in armour. Charming, that white dress drenched with sunlight.”

“And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose we must go to her? Aren’t you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her parties?”

“My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And then”—Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply—“it is well that you should have these distractions.”

“How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?” Felicia remarked.

“A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate managed to get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a very clever fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite extraordinary independence.”

“What is he?—a Liberal?”

“Really, my dear Felicia—your ignorance of politics!” Her father laughed, half approving the indifference to the world’s loud drums such ignorance betokened. “Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is on the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the Admiralty.”

“Personally ambitious, do you mean?”

“When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?” Mr. Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but delicate hand through his hair. “Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if need be, is no longer to be found in British public life.”

Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague attention. “He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly success, and bound to succeed, is clever. It’s a cloddish cleverness, after all. This Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I’ve read a little volume of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle, ironic; bound by no outworn faiths and making use of none for his own advancement; an observer merely, not a scrambler.”

Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, “Scrambling must be nice, I should think.”

She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she worked; it was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that recognized and accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her father made her wince when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the world!

The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as her thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she had burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now, it was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of past energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality of life go by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what avail was the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for armed faiths? She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses strayed by. But though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart attitude as sadly funny, her hand had not slackened—she still held her sword. If a lion did come, so much the better for her—and for life.

CHAPTER II

ONLY one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that afternoon—the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little Gothic church—where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never went, and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate and derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia saw every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely perhaps, for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely decorous well-being of the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her, wings that would fly to risks, a faith that could be won only by fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most things, she found it every morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the symbol that rejected her.

Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than those of their formal intercourse. He wasn’t at all a jackass, and he probably thought her father one, and as Felicia’s place was beside her father the barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr. Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his