lieved to be a woman with a
story--an innocent one, but a story of some sort or other.

In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her elbow
said that he hoped his father had not missed them.

'He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he
cannot have missed us,' she replied.

'_Has_, dear mother--not _have_!' exclaimed the public-school boy, with
an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know that
by this time!'

His mother hastily adopted the correction, and did not resent his making
it, or retaliate, as she might well have done, by bidding him to wipe
that crumby mouth of his, whose condition had been caused by
surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out of
the pocket wherein it lay concealed. After this the pretty woman and the
boy went onward in silence.

That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into
reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have been
assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping her life
as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this.

In a remote nook in North Wessex, forty miles from London, near the
thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village with
its church and parsonage, which she knew well enough, but her son had
never seen. It was her native village, Gaymead, and the first event
bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that place when she
was only a girl of nineteen.

How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-comedy,
the death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened on a spring
evening, and she who now and for many years had filled that first wife's
place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.

When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was
announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who were
living in the same village, to tell them the sad news. As she opened the
white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose westward,
shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she discerned, without
much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the hedge, though she
roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, 'Oh, Sam, how you frightened
me!'

He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the
particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young
people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic m