everything, and our sticks of chairs and tables filled but two or three rooms.  Half the little house, or ‘villa’ as we called it, was not papered, two-thirds were not furnished.  The workmen were still finishing the outside when we arrived, and in that connection I recall a little incident which exhibits my Father’s morbid delicacy of conscience.  He was accustomed in his brighter moments—­and this was before the publication of his ’Omphalos’—­occasionally to sing loud Dorsetshire songs of his early days, in a strange, broad Wessex lingo that I loved.  One October afternoon he and I were sitting on the verandah, and my Father was singing; just around the corner, out of sight, two carpenters were putting up the framework of a greenhouse.  In a pause, one of them said to his fellow:  ’He can zing a zong, zo well’s another, though he be a minister.’  My Father, who was holding my hand loosely, clutched it, and looking up, I saw his eyes darken.  He never sang a secular song again during the whole of his life.

Later in the year, and after his literary misfortune, his conscience became more troublesome than ever.  I think he considered the failure of his attempt at the reconciliation of science with religion to have been intended by God as a punishment for something he had done or left undone.  In those brooding tramps around and around the garden, his soul was on its knees searching the corners of his conscience for some sin of omission or commission, and one by one every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle scraped out of the dust of past experience, was magnified into a huge offence.  He thought that the smallest evidence of levity, the least unbending to human instinct, might be seized by those around him as evidence of inconsistency, and might lead the weaker brethren into offence.  The incident of the carpenters and the comic song is typical of a condition of mind which now possessed my Father, in which act after act became taboo, not because each was sinful in itself, but because it might lead others into sin.

I have the conviction that Miss Marks was now mightily afraid of my Father.  Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she called her ‘boudoir’, a small, chilly apartment, sparsely furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the vegetable garden.  Very properly, that she might have some sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower, which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity.  Through the key-hole I could see practically nothing; one day I contrived to slip inside, and discovered that there was nothing to see but a plain bedstead and a toilet-table, void of all attraction.  In this ‘boudoir’, on winter afternoons, a fire would be lighted, and Miss Marks would withdraw to it, not seen by us anymore between high-tea and the apocalyptic exercise known as ’worship’—­in less strenuous households much less austerely practised under the name of ‘family prayers’.  Left meanwhile