re no flowers to be seen but Michaelmas daisies and phlox.

"Ah, I told Birdwood to confiscate those abominable dahlias which
wretched Mrs. Godbold will plant every year. I gave her some of that new
saxifrage I raised. What more does the woman want?"

Pauline hung upon his arm while they walked back to the Rectory through
the darkling plantation.

"Isn't it a perfect place?" she murmured, hugging his arm closer when
they came to the end of the mossy path and saw the twinkling of the
drawing-room's oriel on the narrow south side, and the eleven steep
gables that cleft the now scarcely luminous sky, one after another all
the length of the house.

"I doubt if anything but this confounded cotoneaster would do well
against this wall," replied the Rector.

He never failed to make this observation when he reached his front door;
and his family knew that one day the cotoneaster would be torn down for
a succession of camellias to struggle with the east winds of unkind
Oxfordshire. In the hall Mrs. Grey and Margaret were bending over a
table.

"Guy has left his card," said Margaret.

"Is that the man who came to see me about the rats?" asked the Rector.

"No, no, Francis," said Mrs. Grey. "Guy is the young man at Plashers
Mead."

"Isn't Francis sweet?" cried Pauline, reaching up to kiss him.

"Hush, Pauline. Pauline, you must not call your father Francis in the
hall," said Mrs. Grey.

"How touching of Guy to leave a card," Pauline murmured, looking at the
oblong of pasteboard shimmering in the gloom.

"Now we've just time to practise the Mendelssohn trio before dinner,"
declared Mrs. Grey. "And that will make you warm."

The Rector wandered off to his library. Margaret and Pauline went with
their mother up shadowy staircases and through shadowy corridors to the
great music-room that ran half the length of the roof. Monica was
already seated at the piano, all white and golden herself in the
candle-light. Languidly Margaret unpacked her violoncello; Pauline tuned
her violin. Soon the house was full of music, and the wind in the night
was scarcely audible.

NOVEMBER

When Guy left the Rectory that October afternoon, he felt as if he had
put back upon its shelf a book the inside of which, thus briefly glanced
at, held for him, whenever he should be privileged to open it again, a
new, indeed an almost magical, representation of life. On his fancy the
Greys had impressed themselves with a kind of abundant nat