“May I make a personal remark?” asked Rachel, who had been admiring the pale brown face of Morna in her turn, as they came slowly back to the house across the lawns.

“You frighten me,” said Morna, laughing.  “But let me hear the worst.”

“It’s the ribbon on your hat,” went on Rachel.  “What pretty colors!  Are they your husband’s school or college?”

“No,” said Morna, blushing as she laughed again.  “No, they’re my own college colors.”

Rachel stood still on the grass.

“Have you really been at college?” said she; but her tone was so obviously one of envy that Morna, who was delightfully sensitive about her learning, did not even think of the short answer which she sometimes returned to the astonished queries of the intellectually vulgar, but admitted the impeachment with another laugh.

“Now, don’t say you wouldn’t have thought it of me,” she added, “and don’t say you would!”

“I am far too jealous to say anything at all,” Rachel answered with a flattering stare.  “And do you mean to tell me that you took a degree?”

“Of sorts,” admitted Morna, whose spoken English was by no means undefiled.  But it turned out to have been a mathematical degree; and when, under sympathetic pressure, Morna vouchsafed particulars, even Rachel knew enough to appreciate the honors which the vicar’s wife had won.  What was more difficult to understand was how so young a woman of such distinguished attainments could be content to hide her light under the bushel of a country vicarage; and Rachel could not resist some expression of her wonderment on that point.

“Did you do nothing with it all,” she asked, “before you married?”

“No,” said Morna; “you see, I got engaged in the middle of it, and the week after the lists came out we were married.”

“What a career to have given up!”

“I would give it up again,” said Morna, with a warmer blush; and Rachel was left with a deeper envy.

“I am afraid we shall have nothing in common,” sighed Mrs. Steel, as they neared the house.  “I have no education worthy the name.”

Morna waxed all but indignant at the implication; she had a morbid horror of being considered a “blue-stocking,” which she revealed with much girlish naivete and unconscious simplicity of sentiment and praise.  She was not so narrow as all that; she had had enough of learning; she had forgotten all that she had learnt; any dolt could be crammed to pass examinations.  On the contrary, she was quite sure they would have heaps in common; for example, she was longing for some one to bicycle with; her husband seldom had the time, and he did not care for her to go quite alone in the country roads.

“But I don’t bicycle,” said Mrs. Steel, shaking her head rather sadly.

“Ah, I forgot!  People who ride and drive never do.”  And it was Morna’s turn to sigh.

“No, I should like it; but I have never tried.”