Annabel met his look for a moment, expressing all the friendly interest which she felt.  Mr. Newthorpe, who had been pacing on the grass, came to a seat.  He placed himself next to Paula.  She glanced at him, and he said kindly: 

‘You are quite sure you don’t feel cold?’

‘I dare say I’d better go in,’ she replied, checking a little sigh as she closed her magazine.

‘No, no, don’t go, Paula!’ urged her cousin, rising.  ’You shall have a shawl, dear; I’ll get it.’

‘It is very warm,’ put in Egremont.  ’There surely can’t be any danger in sitting till it grows dark.’

This little fuss about her soothed Paula for a while.

‘Oh, I don’t want to go,’ she said.  ’I feel I’m getting very serious and wise, listening to such talk.  Now we shall hear, I suppose, what you mean by your “local preacher"?’

Annabel brought a shawl and placed it carefully about the girl’s shoulders.  Then she said to her father: 

‘Let me sit next to Paula, please.’

The change of seats was effected.  Annabel secretly took one of her cousin’s hands and held it.  Paula seemed to regard a distant object in the garden.

There was silence for a few moments.  The evening was profoundly calm.  A spirit of solemn loveliness brooded upon the hills, glorious with sunset.  The gnats hummed, rising and falling in myriad crowds about the motionless leaves.  A spring which fell from a rock at the foot of the garden babbled poetry of the twilight.

‘I hope it is something very practicable,’ Annabel resumed, looking with expectancy at Egremont.

’I will have your opinion on that.  I believe it to be practical enough; at all events, it is a scheme of very modest dimensions.  That story of the child and her paper fixed certain thoughts that had been floating about in my mind.  You know that I have long enough tried to find work, but I have been misled by the common tendency of the time.  Those who want to be of social usefulness for the most part attack the lowest stratum.  It seems like going to the heart of the problem, of course, and any one who has means finds there the hope of readiest result—­material result.  But I think that the really practical task is the most neglected, just because it does not appear so pressing.  With the mud at the bottom of society we can practically do nothing; only the vast changes to be wrought by time will cleanse that foulness, by destroying the monstrous wrong which produces it.  What I should like to attempt would be the spiritual education of the upper artisan and mechanic class.  At present they are all but wholly in the hands of men who can do them nothing but harm—­journalists, socialists, vulgar propagators of what is called freethought.  These all work against culture, yet here is the field really waiting for the right tillage.  I often have in mind one or two of the men at our factory in Lambeth.  They are well-conducted and intelligent