Daintree family that if
Vera would only consent to yield to the solicitations of the Reverend
Albert Gisburne, and transfer herself to Tripton Rectory for life, it
would be the simplest and easiest solution of a good many difficult
problems concerning her.

In point of fact, Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree
household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much
out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a
Gloire de Dijon rose in a field of turnips.

It was not her beauty alone, but her whole previous life which unfitted
her for the things amongst which she found herself suddenly transplanted.
She was no young unformed child, but a woman of the world, who had been
courted and flattered and sought after; who had learnt to hold her own,
and to fight her battles single-handed, and who knew far more about
the dangers and difficulties of life than did the simple-hearted
brother-in-law, under whose charge she now found herself, or the timid,
gentle sister who was so many years her senior.

But if she was cognizant of the world and its ways, Vera knew absolutely
nothing about the life of an English vicarage. Sunday schools and
mothers' meetings were enigmas to her; clothing clubs and friendly
societies, hopeless and uninteresting mysteries which she had no desire
to solve. She had no place in the daily routine. What was she to do
amongst it all?

Vera did what was most pleasant and also most natural to her--she did
nothing. She was by habit and by culture essentially indolent. The
southern blood she inherited, the life of the Italian fine lady she had
led, made her languid and fond of inaction. To lie late in bed, to sip
chocolate, and open her letters before she rose; to be dressed and
re-dressed by a fashionable lady's maid; to recline in luxurious
carriages, and to listen lazily to the flattery and adulation that had
surrounded her--that had been Vera's life from morning till night ever
since she grew up.

How, with such antecedents, was she to enter suddenly into all the
activity of an English clergyman's home? There were the schools, and the
vestry meetings, and the sick and the destitute to be fretted after from
Monday morning till Saturday night--Eustace and Marion hardly ever had a
moment's respite or a leisure hour the whole week; whilst Sunday, of
course, was the hardest day's work of all.

But Vera could not turn her life into these things. She