and an occasional admonitory peck from the old
starling. Dick had come in late and settled himself upon the seat behind
the row of chairs. Upon the commencement of the sermon he had put his
back against the partition supporting the curtain, and his long legs up
on the bench in front of him, and by the look on his lean, sunburnt face
was apparently resting his brain as well as his body.

"Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" The
technique of the Rector's sermons involved the repetition of his text at
stated intervals. Cicely thought, as the words fell on her ears for the
third or fourth time, that she could have supplied a meaning to them
which had escaped the preacher. Food and raiment! That represented all
the things amongst which she had been brought up, the large, comfortable
rooms in the big house, the abundant, punctual meals, the tribe of
servants, the clothes and the trinkets, the gardens and stables,
well-stocked and well-filled, the home farm, kept up to supply the needs
of the large household, everything that came to the children of a
well-to-do country gentleman as a matter of course, and made life
easy--but oh, how dull!

No one seeing her sitting there quietly, her slender, ungloved hands
lying in her lap, prettily dressed in a cool summer frock and a shady,
flower-trimmed hat, with the jewelled chains and bracelets and brooches
of a rich man's daughter rousing the admiring envy of the
school-children, whose weekly excitement it was to count them up--nobody
would have thought that under the plaited tresses of this young girl's
shapely head was a brain seething in revolt, or that the silken laces of
her bodice muffled the beatings of a heart suffocated by the luxurious
dulness of a life which she now told herself had become insupportable.
Cicely had thought a great deal since her visit to London and Muriel's
wedding, and had arrived at this conclusion--that she was suffocating,
and that her life was insupportable.

She raised her eyes and glanced at her father, wrapped in the pleasant
slumber that overtakes healthy, out-of-door men when they are forced for
a time into unwonted quiescence, and at her brother, calm and
self-satisfied, dressed with a correct elaboration that was only
unobtrusive because it was so expensively perfect. The men of the
family--everything was done to bring them honour and gratification. They
had everything they wanted and did what they would. It was to them t