s on _The
Fauna and Flora of the Mosaic Books in their Relation to Modern Botanical
Investigation_, must be within your recollection. It was followed, you
remember, by _The Dean's Duty_, which, being published at a time when there
was, so to speak, a boom in religious novels, was ordered by many readers
under the impression that it was likely to upset their mature religious
convictions by its assaults on orthodoxy. Their disappointment when two
stout tomes, dealing historically with the _status_ and duties of Deans,
were delivered to them, was the theme of cheerful comment amongst the
light-hearted members of the Dean's own family.

[Illustration]

Was there ever in this world so delightful a family circle as that of the
Deanery? The daughters were all pretty, but that was their smallest merit.
They were all clever, and well-read, without a tinge of the bluestocking,
and most of them were musical to the tips of their slender fingers. How
merrily their laughter used to ring across the ancient close, and how
playfully and gently they used to rally the dear learned old Dean who had
watched over them and cared for them since Mrs. MAYBLOOM'S death, many
years before, with all the tender care of the most devoted mother. And of
this fair and smiling throng, "my only rosary," as the Dean used to call
them, HERMIONE was, I think, the prettiest, as she was certainly the most
accomplished. Every kind of gift had been showered upon her by Nature. When
she played her violin, accompanied by her elder sister on the piano, tears
trickled unbidden down the aquiline nose of the militant Bishop of
Archester, the chapter stood hushed to a man, and the surrounding curates
were only prevented by a salutary fear of ruining their chances of
preferment from laying themselves, their pittances, and their garnered
store of slippers at her pretty feet. Then in a fit of charming petulance,
she would break off in the middle of the piece, lay down her violin, and,
with a pretty imperiousness, command a younger sister to fetch her zither,
on which to complete the subjugation of her adorers. And then her
caricatures--summer-lightning flashes of pencilled wit, as I heard the
Reverend SIMEON COPE describe them in a moment of enthusiasm after she had
shown us her sketch of his rival, the Reverend STEPHEN HANKINSON.

But even in those days, while she still had about her all the fascinations
of peerless beauty and fresh and glowing youth, I mistrusted her.