kefulness.

'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly. But soldiers, of all
men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness. He has
never complained; not once. I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul. I can
imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
resolving not to groan.'

'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
emotional nature,' said Grace.

Jane shook her head. She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early
in the morning, after Grace had gone to London. Miss Colesworth was
coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.
Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of
Letters who lived by the work of his pen. She remembered comparing him to
one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him rest
or land in view. He had made a little money by a book, and was expending
it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth to be
thinking. He talked well, but for the present she was happier in her
prospect of nearly a week of loneliness. The day was one of sunshine,
windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April when the pettish
month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the end of the
day. The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches shot up green
spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep ditchbanks
unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might light on a
late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran along the
banks. Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live their life,
especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on our poets;
hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of the arrival of one of the minstrel order:
and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if
requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower. But now they cried out to
her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to
her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that
would have done honour to the procession of the children's May-day--a day
she excused for the slaughter beca