ndered a long way that night amid these influences--so
far as to the old Hope Churchyard, which lay in a ravine formed by a
landslip ages ago. The church had slipped down with the rest of the
cliff, and had long been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this last
local stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingered
yet, Christianity had established itself precariously at best. In that
solemn spot Pierston kissed her.

The kiss was by no means on Avice's initiative this time. Her former
demonstrativeness seemed to have increased her present reserve.

* * *

That day was the beginning of a pleasant month passed mainly in each
other's society. He found that she could not only recite poetry at
intellectual gatherings, but play the piano fairly, and sing to her own
accompaniment.

He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been to
get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and individual
life as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an exact copy
of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there was
nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget all
the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs
purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the local
vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived in a
house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to draw
London suburban villas from printed copies.

Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl's
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the bone,
but she could not escape the tendency of the age.

The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward to
it sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing.
Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had
prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old
stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as
strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large
measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's
education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered
if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the changing
manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a betrothal,
according to the precedent of their sires and g