s differ," said his wife grimly--and so, God knows, they do!

THE GOSPEL

For the first few days of her stay there, she thought little enough of
the strangeness of the situation. To think of it, to marvel at the
neat stillness, the quiet precision of all the domestic arrangements,
would have been to let her mind dwell on just what she had to avoid.
She was sick to her very soul of all that the words "domestic
arrangements" implied; sick with an actual spiritual nausea. It was
honestly no exaggeration to say that she would gladly have died rather
than take the trouble to arrange the details of living.

So every morning she woke when her dreams ended and lay staring idly,
through the cross-bars of the primitive window-netting, at the swaying,
sinking, tree-tops, and the floating white above them, so white between
the blue and green; and then her breakfast came, fresh and chill and
shining, with a flaming nasturtium on the snowy linen; and then a
dreamy time, when thought ranged among stray lines of poetry and
memories of childhood; and then some one rubbed and kneaded and ironed
out her tired muscles and she slept again. Sometimes foaming milk came
in a beaded brown pitcher that smelt of dairies; sometimes luscious,
quartered fruits, smothered in clotting cream, tempted a palate nearly
dulled beyond recall; sometimes rich, salted broth steamed in a dim,
blue bowl till she regretted to see the bottom of it.

And just at that time she was lifted into a long, basket chair and,
propped in lavendered pillows, looked dreamily into the hills and
pastures rolling out in front of her. Cows wandered here and there,
birds swooped lazily through the June blue, the faintest scent of
grapevines hung on the wind. But no human figures blotted the
landscape; only the faint, musical clash of distant scythes (a sound as
natural as the cawing and lowing and interminable twittering of the
busy animal world all around) spoke of men.

Then one day (it might have been a week's time) she caught herself
listening for sounds of household labour. Where was the breaking, the
slamming, the whistling, the quarrelling, the brushing and the rattling
that these thin partitions ought to filter through? Simply, it was
not. A little faint, suspicious worry came to her: the house was a
tomb, then? Did it have to be? Was she as bad as that?

And when her tray came next, some kind of savoury stew, by now, with
fresh picked strawberries on