es across the sunny life of the bore.

"I said so half an hour ago," he remarked severely, "when we were
inspecting my new manure tanks, and you said you did not notice it."

"You were right all the same," said the younger man.

What an interest would be added to life if it were possible to ascertain
how many thousands of times people like Colonel Bellairs are limply
assured that they are in the right! The mistake of statistics is that
they are always compiled on such dull subjects. Who cares to know how
many infants are born, and how many deaf mutes exist? But we should
devour statistics, we should read nothing else if only they dealt with
matters of real interest: if they recorded how often Mr. Simpson, the
decadent poet, had said he was "a child of nature," how often, if ever,
the Duchess of Inveraven and Mr. Brown, the junior curate at
Salvage-on-Sea, had owned they had been in the wrong; whether it was
true that an Archbishop had ever really said "I am sorry" without an
"if" after it, and, if so, on what occasion; and whether any novelist
exists who has not affirmed at least five hundred times that criticism
is a lost art.

"Is the right-of-way dispute progressing?" said Magdalen to her father
as the two men came up and stopped in front of them.

Colonel Bellairs implied that it would shortly be arranged, as his
intellect was being applied to the subject.

Wentworth said emphatically, for about the thirtieth time, that the
right of a footpath, or church path across the domain was well
established and could not be set aside; but that whether it was also a
bridle path was the moot point; and whether Colonel Bellairs was
justified in his recent erection of a five-barred stile.

(I may as well add here, for fear the subject should escape my mind
later on, that at the time of these pages going to press the dispute,
often on the verge of a settlement, had reached a further and acuter
stage, being complicated by Colonel Bellairs' sudden denial even of a
church path, to the legal existence of which he had previously agreed in
writing.)

Wentworth trod upon the crocus and said he must be going home.

"We will walk back to the house with you," said Magdalen, and she led
the way with her father.

"I wish you would tell your Aunt Mary," he said to Magdalen as they
walked on, "that I will not have her servants wandering in Lindley wood.
Jones tells me they were there again last Sunday with a dog, that
accursed littl