an easy one for him.

"The beauty of the evening tempted me," he said, growing more at his
ease.

"And shall not our beauty tempt you as well," suggested Mrs. Medhurst
laughingly, "to come and see our humble cottage. It is a quaint
place. Mr. Medhurst bought it and we furnished it ourselves."

"Do come, Morgan," put in Margaret persuasively, as if some instinct
told her he was going to hesitate.

He knew that battling against the temptation would be hopeless. He
seemed to be walking with angels in the last flood of the evening
sunlight, and something of the divine calm of evening came over his
spirit. He was borne along, gently, gently, till all the sense of the
day's toil behind him fell away. The cool air breathed on him, and
fluttered the blades of grass on the common, and shook the purple
wild-flowers that grew along the wayside. It was laden with the odour
of the sheaves that were spread over the fields amid the brown
stubble, and seemed to waft to him something of the elemental poetry
of the great mother Earth, of the informing spirit of religions of
antiquity, of the human joy in the harvest festival, of the symbolic
cornucopia, of the grateful offerings of first-fruits.

With a rare understanding of his emotions, they referred no more to
him or his work, but plunged at once into their holiday adventures, so
that he also was carried away from himself. Diana was learning to
swim, and was as full of the subject as she had once or twice,
according to her own account, been of sea-water. Margaret's
enthusiasms were all for boating, and she took the others out whenever
the sea was smooth enough to soothe her mother's fears. The cottage,
too, was such fun that they never grew tired of it. And then there was
a field near at hand where they had a tennis-court marked out, and
where Diana and Margaret kept the ball going between them.

It did not take them long to reach St. Margaret's, and they entered
their cottage just as the sun was on the point of sinking. Morgan, now
abandoned to his adventure, was delighted with the curiously-built
place, with its tiny hall, on one side of which was the little
drawing-room, and on the other the dining-room. The walls were boarded
and the ceilings were low, rough and whitewashed. Sketches and prints
were hung in profusion, nooks were draped, and wicker and quaint
chairs and knick-knacks were arranged in a charming disorder, whilst
books were scattered everywhere. A piano loomed