Just then the jam boiled over, and she had to leave her pots to run and save it.

It is a great thing to have your mind under fair control; the Polkington training, wherein the advisable and advantageous were compelled to rank high even in matter of emotion, is not without use in bringing this about.  But it is also a great thing, almost, perhaps, a more important one for some people, to have plenty to do even if it is only making jam.

While Julia made her jam Captain Polkington hoed; at least he did for a little while, then he gradually ceased and stood leaning upon his hoe, lost in unhappy thought.  At last he moved, and, gathering the withering weeds that lay beside the path, carried them to an old basket which he had left beside the garden wall.  With the weeds he picked up the torn fragments of card which Julia had dropped beside the doorstep; he let them fall into the basket with the other rubbish, but when he saw them gleaming white among the green they arrested his attention.  For a moment he looked at them, then he carefully picked them out; he had some thought of appealing to Julia once more, or telling her that he had saved the man’s address for her and she had one last chance.  He sat down on the wall; would it be any good to appeal? he asked himself despondently.  Would anything be any good?  Was not everything a failure?  No one regarded him; Cross, the man whose card he held, had not even glanced in his direction when he went down the path.  A miserable bargain-driving tradesman had passed him and paid no more attention to him than if he had been a gardener!  Gillat, his own friend, did not regard him, thought nothing of his comforts; he was all for Julia; thought of nothing and no one else.  As for Julia herself, she had not the slightest regard for him, no consideration, not even filial respect and obedience.

He looked gloomily before him for a little, then his eye fell on the white fragments he held, the address of the man who was anxious to buy the daffodil which Julia in her obstinate folly and selfish unreasonableness, would not sell.  If it only were sold!  He thought over all the good things that could then be done; they were the same as those excellent reasons that he had himself given a little while back.  Some people might have said they were rather diverse and not all mutually inclusive, but no such idea troubled him; he was sure all could easily have been done if the daffodil were sold.  He felt that he could have done it all quite well, he did not stop to think how—­if he had had the handling of the money he could have been a benefactor to his whole family, especially Julia.  It was hard that he should be prevented, bitterly hard; it had so often happened in his life that he had been prevented from doing what was good and useful by want of means and opportunity or the stupid obstinacy of other people.  He grew more and more depressed as he sat on the wall thinking of these things and wondering if there were many men so useless, so unfortunate and misunderstood as he.