his work, at will.  But the last chapter, like the first, he elected to write in the study at The Hard.  A pious offering of incense, this, to the pleasant memory of that excellent scholar and devoted amateur of letters, his great-uncle, Thomas Clarkson Verity, whose society and conversation awakened the literary sense in him as a schoolboy, on holiday from Harchester, now nearly five decades ago.  He judged it a matter of good omen, moreover,—­toying for the moment with kindly superstition—­that the book should issue from a house redeemed by his kinsman from base and brutal uses and dedicated to the worship of knowledge and of the printed word.  That fat, soft-bodied, mercurial-minded little gentleman—­to whom no record of human endeavour, of human speculation, mental or moral experiment, came amiss—­would surely relish the compliment, if his curious and genial ghost still, in any sort, had cognizance of this, his former, dwelling-place.

The Hard, just now, showed a remarkably engaging countenance, the year standing on the threshold of May.—­Mild softly bright weather made amends for a wet and windy April, with sunshine and high forget-me-not blue skies shading to silver along the sea-line.  The flower-beds, before the garden house-front, were crowded with early tulips, scarlet, golden, and shell-pink.  Shrubberies glowed with rhododendrons, flamed with azaleas.  At the corner of the battery and sea-wall, misty grey-green plumes of tamarisk veiled the tender background of grey-blue water and yellow-grey sand.  Birds peopled the scene.  Gulls, in strong fierce flight, laughed overhead.  Swallows darted back and forth, ceaselessly twittering, as they built their cup-shaped mud nests beneath the eaves.  Upon the lawn companies of starlings ran, flapping glossy wings, squealing, whistling; to the annoyance of a song thrush, in spotted waistcoat and neatly fitting brown surtout, who, now tall, now flattened to the level of the turf, its head turned sideways, peered and listened, locating the presence of the victim worm.—­Three or four vigorous pecks—­the starlings running elsewhere—­to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with most unlovely gusto.—­The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the linnets, tits, and gold-finches.

Such, out of doors, was the home world which received Damaris after those many months of continental travel, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday.  To pass from the dynamic to the static mode must be always something of an embarrassment and trial, especially to the young with whom sensation is almost disconcertingly direct and lively.  Damaris suffered the change of conditions not without a measure or doubt and wonder.  For they made demands to which she had become unaccustomed, and to which she found it difficult to submit quite naturally and simply.  A whole social and domestic order, bristling with petty obligations, closed down upon her, within the bounds of which she felt to move awkwardly, at first, conscious of constraint.