. The fretted sunlight made shifting figures of
brightness on the ground; above the innumerable leaves rustled and
whispered; a squirrel darted along a branch and watched the intruders
with bright, curious eyes; the rooks cawed from the distance; the
pigeons cooed in sweet, sad cadence close at hand. They sat down on
the bare roots at their feet and yielded themselves to the genius of
the forest--the god who will receive the heart torn and distracted by
the fierce haste and unfinished labours and vain ambitions of life, and
will lay its fever to rest and encompass it with the quietness of
eternity.

"Father," whispered Kate, after a while, as one wishing to share
confidences, for there must be something to tell, "where are you?"

"You wish to know? Well, all day I 've been fishing down the stream,
and am coming home, very tired, very dirty, very happy, and I meet my
mother just outside those trees. I am boasting of the fish that I have
caught, none of which, I 'm sure, can be less than half a pound. She
is rating me for my appearance and beseeching me to keep at a distance.
Then I go home and down into the vaulted kitchen, where Janet's mother
gives me joyous welcome, and produces dainties saved from dinner for my
eating. The trouts are now at biggest only a quarter of a pound, for
they have to be cooked as a final course, but those that were hooked
and escaped are each a pound, except one in the hole below Lynedoch
Bridge, which was two pounds to an ounce. Afterwards I make a brave
attempt to rehearse the day in the gunroom to Sandie, who first taught
me to cast a line, and fall fast asleep, and, being shaken up, sneak
off to bed, creeping slowly up the stair, where the light is falling,
to the little room above yours, where, as I am falling over, I seem to
hear my mother's voice as in this sighing of the wind. Ah me, what a
day it was! And you, Kit?"

"Oh, I was back in the convent with my nuns, and Sister Flora was
trying to teach me English grammar in good French, and I was correcting
her in bad French, and she begins to laugh because it is all so droll.
'I am Scotch, and I teach you English all wrong, and you tell me what I
ought to say in French which is all wrong; let us go into the garden,'
for she was a perfect love, and always covered my faults. I am sitting
in the arbour, and the Sister brings a pear that has fallen. 'I do not
think it is wicked,' she says, and I say it is simply a duty to eat up