e.'"

'And when society asks, "Who _is_ your wife?'"

'I shall reply, "She is the daughter of the drunken organist who
desecrated my father's tomb, though that concerns you not:--her own
speciality, as you see, is that she is the flower of all girlhood."'

'And when society rejects this earthly paragon?'

'Then I shall reject society.'

'Reject society, boy!' said my mother. 'Why, Cyril Aylwin himself,
the bohemian painter who has done his best to cheapen and vulgarise
our name, is not a more reckless, lawless leveller than you. And,
good heavens! to him, and perhaps afterwards to you, will come--the
coronet.'

And she left the room.

III

WINIFRED'S DUKKERIPEN

I

I need not describe my journey to North Wales. On reaching Bettws y
Coed I turned into the hotel there--'The Royal Oak'--famished; for,
as fast as trains could carry me, I had travelled right across
England, leaving rest and meals to chance. I found the hotel full of
English painters, whom the fine summer had attracted thither as
usual. The landlord got me a bed in the village. A six-o'clock _table
d'hote_ was going on when I arrived, and I joined it. Save myself,
the guests were, I think, landscape painters to a man. They had been
sketching in the neighbourhood. I thought I had never met so genial
and good-natured a set of men, and I have since often wondered what
they thought of me, who met such courteous and friendly advances as
they made towards me in a temper that must have seemed to them morose
or churlish and stupid. Before the dinner was over another tourist
entered--a fresh-complexioned young Englishman in spectacles, who,
sitting next to me, did at length, by force of sheer good-humour,
contrive to get into a desultory kind of conversation with me, and,
as far as I remember, he talked well. He was not an artist, I found,
but an amateur geologist and antiquary. His hobby was not like that
fatal antiquarianism of my father's, which had worked so much
mischief, but the harmless quest of flint implements. His talk about
his collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to Flinty Point
and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built walls of Raxton church.
After dinner, coffee, liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the
dining-room, I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel till
bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in torrents. I was
compelled to return to my friend of the 'flints.' At that moment one
of the artists