She felt herself very candid, but why would Aunt Jane look at those tell-tale cheeks.

Sunday was wet, or rather ‘misty moisty,’ with a raw sea-fog overhanging everything—–­not bad enough, however, to keep any one except Aunt Ada from church or school, though she decidedly remonstrated against Gillian’s going out for her wandering in the garden in such weather; and, if she had been like the other aunt, might almost have been convinced that such determination must be for an object.  However, Gillian encountered the fog in vain, though she walked up and down the path till her clothes were quite limp and flabby with damp.  All the view that rewarded her was the outline of the shrubs looming through the mist like distant forests as mountains.  Moreover, she got a scolding from Aunt Ada, who met her coming in, and was horrified at the misty atmosphere which she was said to have brought in, and insisted on her going at once to change her dress, and staying by the fireside all the rest of the afternoon.

’I cannot think what makes her so eager about going out in the afternoon,’ said the younger aunt to the elder.  ’It is impossible that she can have any reason for it.’

‘Only Sunday restlessness,’ said Miss Mohun, ’added to the reckless folly of the “Bachfisch” about health.’

‘That’s true,’ said Adeline, ’girls must be either so delicate that they are quite helpless, or so strong as to be absolutely weather-proof.’

Fortune, however, favoured Gillian when next she went to Lily Giles.  She had never succeeded in taking real interest in the girl, who seemed to her to be so silly and sentimental that an impulse to answer drily instantly closed up all inclination to effusions of confidence.  Gillian had not yet learnt breadth of charity enough to understand that everybody does not feel, or express feeling, after the same pattern; that gush is not always either folly or insincerity; and that girls of Lily’s class are about at the same stage of culture as the young ladies of whom her namesake in the Inheritance is the type.  When Lily showed her in some little magazine the weakest of poetry, and called it so sweet, just like ’dear Mr. Grant’s lovely sermon, the last she had heard.  Did he not look so like a saint in his surplice and white stole, with his holy face and beautiful blue eyes; it was enough to make any one feel good to look at him,’ Gillian simply replied, ’Oh, I never think of the clergyman’s looks,’ and hurried to her book, feeling infinitely disgusted and contemptuous, never guessing that these poor verses, and the curate’s sermons and devotional appearance were, to the young girl’s heart, the symbols of all that was sacred, and all that was refined, and that the thought of them was the solace of her lonely and suffering hours.  Tolerant sympathy is one of the latest lessons of life, and perhaps it is well that only

’The calm temper of our age should be
Like the high leaves upon the holly-tree,’