“Don’t be unreasonable, my Helen!” said the curate, looking into the lovely eyes whose colors seemed a little blown about in their rings.  “Don’t you see it is my way of feeling to myself how much, and with what a halo about them, they are mine?  If I had bought them with my own money, I should hardly care for them.  Thank God, they are not mine that way, or in any way like that way. You are mine, my life, and they are yours—­mine therefore because they are about you like your clothes or your watch.  They are mine as your handkerchief and your gloves are mine—­through worshiping love.  Listen to reason.  If a thing is yours it is ten times more mine than if I had bought it, for, just because it is yours, I am able to possess it as the meek, and not the land-owners, inherit the earth.  It makes having such a deep and high—­indeed a perfect thing!  I take pleasure without an atom of shame in every rich thing you have brought me.  Do you think, if you died, and I carried your watch, I should ever cease to feel the watch was yours?  Just so they are your ponies; and if you don’t like me to say so, you can contradict me every time, you know, all the same.”

“I know people will think I am like the lady we heard of the other day, who told her husband the sideboard was hers, not his.  Thomas, I hate to look like the rich one, when all that makes life worth living for, or fit to be lived, was and is given me by you.”

“No, no, no, my darling! don’t say that; you terrify me.  I was but the postman that brought you the good news.”

“Well! and what else with me and the ponies and the money and all that?  Did I make the ponies?  Or did I even earn the money that bought them?  It is only the money my father and brother have done with.  Don’t make me look as if I did not behave like a lady to my own husband, Thomas.”

“Well, my beautiful, I’ll make up for all my wrongs by ordering you about as if I were the Marquis of Saluzzo, and you the patient Grisel.”

“I wish you would.  You don’t order me about half enough.”

“I’ll try to do better.  You shall see.”

Nestley was a lovely place, and the house was old enough to be quite respectable—­one of those houses with a history and a growth, which are getting rarer every day as the ugly temples of mammon usurp their places.  It was dusky, cool, and somber—­a little shabby, indeed, which fell in harmoniously with its peculiar charm, and indeed added to it.  A lawn, not immaculate of the sweet fault of daisies, sank slowly to a babbling little tributary of the Lythe, and beyond were fern-covered slopes, and heather, and furze, and pine-woods.  The rector was a sensible Englishman, who objected to have things done after the taste of his gardener instead of his own.  He loved grass like a village poet, and would have no flower-beds cut in his lawn.  Neither would he have any flowers planted in the summer to be taken up again before the winter.  He would have no cockney gardening about his place, he said.  Perhaps that was partly why he never employed any but his old cottagers about the grounds; and the result was that for half the show he had twice the loveliness.  His ambition was to have every possible English garden flower.