ed a smaller mind.

"Well, well," said she, softening; "but ye see it never rains with a hot
sun, and the flowers they know that; and look to be watered after
Nature, or else they take it amiss. You, and all your sort, sir, you
think to be stronger than Nature; you do fast and pray all day, and
won't look at a woman like other men; and now you wants to water the
very flowers at noon!"

"Betty," said Leonard smiling, "I yield to thy superior wisdom, and I
will water them at morn and eve. In truth we have all much to learn: let
us try and teach one another as kindly as we can."

"I wish you'd teach me to be as humble as you be," blurted out Betty,
with something very like a sob: "and more respectful to my betters,"
added she, angrily.

Watering the flowers she had given him became a solace and a delight to
the solitary priest: he always watered them with his own hands, and felt
quite paternal over them.

One evening Mrs. Gaunt rode by with Griffith, and saw him watering them.
His tall figure, graceful, though inclined to stoop, bent over them with
feminine delicacy; and the simple act, which would have been nothing in
vulgar hands, seemed to Mrs. Gaunt so earnest, tender, and delicate in
him, that her eyes filled, and she murmured, "Poor Brother Leonard!"

"Why, what's wrong with him now?" asked Griffith, a little peevishly.

"That was him watering the flowers."

"O, is that all?" said Griffith, carelessly.

* * * * *

Leonard said to himself, "I go too little abroad among my people." He
made a little round, and it ended in Hernshaw Castle.

Mrs. Gaunt was out.

He looked disappointed; so the servant suggested that perhaps she was in
the Dame's haunt: he pointed to the grove.

Leonard followed his direction, and soon found himself, for the first
time, in that sombre, solemn retreat.

It was a hot summer day, and the grove was delicious. It was also a
place well suited to the imaginative and religious mind of the Italian.

He walked slowly to and fro, in religious meditation. Indeed, he had
nearly thought out his next sermon, when his meditative eye happened to
fall on a terrestrial object that startled and thrilled him. Yet it was
only a lady's glove. It lay at the foot of a rude wooden seat beneath a
gigantic pine.

He stooped and picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called up
in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could fit. He laid the
glove softly