dency to
figure great people as larger than life, until he noticed the manner in
which she handled Lady Egbert, which was so sharply mutinous that it
reassured him. He felt he should have understood her better if he might
have met her eye; but she scarcely so much as glanced at him. "Ah here
they come--all the good ones!" she said at last; and Paul Overt admired
at his distance the return of the church-goers--several persons, in
couples and threes, advancing in a flicker of sun and shade at the end of
a large green vista formed by the level grass and the overarching boughs.

"If you mean to imply that _we're_ bad, I protest," said one of the
gentlemen--"after making one's self agreeable all the morning!"

"Ah if they've found you agreeable--!" Mrs. St. George gaily cried. "But
if we're good the others are better."

"They must be angels then," said the amused General.

"Your husband was an angel, the way he went off at your bidding," the
gentleman who had first spoken declared to Mrs. St. George.

"At my bidding?"

"Didn't you make him go to church?"

"I never made him do anything in my life but once--when I made him burn
up a bad book. That's all!" At her "That's all!" our young friend broke
into an irrepressible laugh; it lasted only a second, but it drew her
eyes to him. His own met them, though not long enough to help him to
understand her; unless it were a step towards this that he saw on the
instant how the burnt book--the way she alluded to it!--would have been
one of her husband's finest things.

"A bad book?" her interlocutor repeated.

"I didn't like it. He went to church because your daughter went," she
continued to General Fancourt. "I think it my duty to call your
attention to his extraordinary demonstrations to your daughter."

"Well, if you don't mind them I don't," the General laughed.

"Il s'attache a ses pas. But I don't wonder--she's so charming."

"I hope she won't make him burn any books!" Paul Overt ventured to
exclaim.

"If she'd make him write a few it would be more to the purpose," said
Mrs. St. George. "He has been of a laziness of late--!"

Our young man stared--he was so struck with the lady's phraseology. Her
"Write a few" seemed to him almost as good as her "That's all." Didn't
she, as the wife of a rare artist, know what it was to produce one
perfect work of art? How in the world did she think they were turned off?
His private conviction was that, admirably as H