day."

She said nothing more about Mrs. Browning and Little Cloisters. But when
Canon Wilton had gone she said to her sister:

"Beattie, does it ever strike you that Canon Wilton's rather abrupt and
unexpected sometimes in what he says?"

"He doesn't beat about the bush," replied Beatrice. "Do you mean that?"

"Perhaps I do. Now I'm going down to Robin. How strong he's getting
here! Hark at his voice! Can't you hear even in his voice how much good
Welsley had done him?"

Robin's determined treble was audible as he piped out:

"Oh no, Fipper! Not by the Bish's wall! Why, I say, the slugs always
comes there. They do, weally! You come and see! Come quick! I'll
show----"

The voice faded in the direction of the Palace.

"I must go down and see if it's true about the slugs," exclaimed
Rosamund.

And with beaming eyes she hastened out of the room.

Beatrice looked after her and sighed. Dion's last letter from South
Africa was lying on the writing-table close to her. Rosamund had already
given it to her to read. Now she took it up and read it carefully again.
The doves cooed in the cloisters; the bells chimed in the tower; the
mellow sunshine--already the sunshine not of full summer, but of the
dawning autumn, with its golden presage of days not golden, and of
nights heavy with dews and laden with floating leaves,--came in through
the lattice, and lay over her soft and wistful melancholy, as she read
of hardship, and dust, and blood and death, told truthfully, but always
cheerfully, as a soldier tells a thing to a woman he loves and wishes to
be sincere with.

Dion was not in the peace. Dear Rosamund! Did she quite realize? And
then Beattie pulled herself up. A disloyal thought surely leaves a stain
on the mind through which it passes. Beattie did not want to have a
stain on her mind. She cared for it as a delicately refined woman cares
for her body, bathing it every day.

She put Dion's letter down.

That evening Rosamund sang at a charity concert in the City Hall.
Her music was already a legend in Welsley and the neighborhood. Mr.
Dickinson, who always accompanied her singing, declared it emphatically
to be "great." The wife of the Bishop, Mrs. Mabberley, pronounced the
verdict, "She sings with her soul rather than with her voice," without
intention of paying a left-handed compliment. The Cathedral Choir boys
affirmed that "our altos are a couple of squeaks beside her." Even Mrs.
Dickinson, "the cold douche