of diverse brain and nerve, and was often a problem to the chief person interested in it.  She thought so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly, brooded so softly!  Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile apparent antagonism and read themselves, forget that they are not full grown.  Longer than others are they young:  but meanwhile they are of an age when we are driven abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett’s farm she made her way to the south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer’s wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under swallows’ eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send from London for coming uses.  He was near the farm-wife’s kitchen, but to windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs.  He whistled to Jane’s dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her primroses.

‘Out?  I feared it would be a week.  Is it quite prudent?’ Jane said, toning down her delight.

He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the settled fact.  Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he was embarked for recovery:  and he told her how the farmer and one of his men had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest physician—­ rather like a crippled ghost.  M. Adister was upstairs in bed with one of her headaches.  Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane supposed:  She spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.

A slight hardening of Philip’s brows, well-known to her by this time, caused her to interrogate his eyes.  They were fixed on her in his manner of gazing with strong directness.  She read the contrary opinion, and some hieroglyphic matter besides.

‘We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,’ she said.  ’I have a great liking for him.  His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are not worth mentioning, they mean nothing.  He would be one of the first to rush to the standard if there were danger; I know he would.  He is truly chivalrous, I am sure.’

Philip’s broad look at her had not swerved.  The bowl of primroses placed beside him on a chair by the farmer’s dame diverted it for a moment.

‘You gathered them?’ he said.

Jane drank his look at the flowers.

‘Yes, on my way,’ she replied.  ’We can none of us live for ever; and fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time.  They had it from the clouds yesterday.  Do they not seem a bath of country happiness!’ Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.

Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.

He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to read it.