d keep a vial of it in a prominent place
on the drawing-room mantelpiece. As it is, I confess my desire is to
carve for myself a name in art that shall be independent of all
adventitious support; to answer to my vocation straight, upright, and
manly."

"That is better than nobility--though I have pride in my own. I wish papa
thought so. Yet he has both himself."

"The fine soul! For fifty years he has stood square to adversity with a
smile on his face. Could I ever achieve that? Already I cry out on
poverty; because I want an unencumbered field for work, and--yes, one
other trifle."

"One other trifle, George?"

He took Plancine's face between his hands and looked very lovingly into
her eyes.

"I think I did the old man too much honour," he said. "You nestling of
eighteen--what credit to scout misfortune with such a bird at one's
side!"

"Ah! but papa is sixty-nine and the bird but eighteen."

"And eighteen years of heaven are a good education in happiness."

So they coo'd, these two. The June scents of the little garden were
wafted all about them. The moon had come up out of the sea, and, finding
a trellis of branches over their heads, hung their young brows with
coronals of shadowy leaves, like the old dame she was, rummaging in her
trinket box for something for her favourites.

In the dimly-luminous parlour (that smelt of folios and warm coffee) of
the little dark house in the background, the figure of papa, poring at
the table over geological maps, was visible.

Fifty years ago an _emigre_, denounced, proscribed, and escaped from the
ruin of a shattered society: here, in '49, a stately, large-boned man,
placidly enjoying the consciousness of a serene dignity maintained at the
expense of much and prolonged self-effacement--this was papa.

Grey hair, thinning but slightly near the temples; grey moustache and
beard pointed _de bouc_; flowered dressing-gown girdled about a heart
as simple as a child's--this was papa, papa who grubbed over his ordnance
surveys while the young folks outside whispered of the stars.

Right beneath them--the latter--a broad gully of the hills went plunging
precipitously, all rolled with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft
blue lias and the very roof ridges of King's Cobb, whose walls and
chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay
that swept the land here like a scythe.

Plancine's village, a lofty appanage or suburb of this little seaboard