tacks
with Mr. Lavington."

"She is right. There WAS a pond with tadpoles," Mrs. Cosham
corroborated. "Millais made studies of it for 'Ophelia.' Some say that
is the best picture he ever painted--"

"And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes
hanging in the toolhouse."

"It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull," Mrs. Milvain
continued. "But that you couldn't remember, though it's true you were
a wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her
father, 'She's watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.'
And they had a nurse in those days," she went on, telling her story with
charming solemnity to Ralph, "who was a good woman, but engaged to a
sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes were
on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl--Susan her name was--to
have him to stay in the village. They abused her goodness, I'm sorry
to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they stood the perambulator
alone in a field where there was a bull. The animal became enraged by
the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows what might have
happened if a gentleman had not been walking by in the nick of time, and
rescued Katharine in his arms!"

"I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia," said Katharine.

"My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not long after it
gored a man to death and had to be destroyed. And your mother forgave
Susan--a thing I could never have done."

"Maggie's sympathies were entirely with Susan and the sailor, I
am sure," said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. "My sister-in-law," she
continued, "has laid her burdens upon Providence at every crisis in her
life, and Providence, I must confess, has responded nobly, so far--"

"Yes," said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the rashness which
irritated the rest of the family. "My mother's bulls always turn into
cows at the critical moment."

"Well," said Mrs. Milvain, "I'm glad you have some one to protect you
from bulls now."

"I can't imagine William protecting any one from bulls," said Katharine.

It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced her pocket volume
of Shakespeare, and was consulting Ralph upon an obscure passage in
"Measure for Measure." He did not at once seize the meaning of what
Katharine and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred to
some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child in a pinafore;
but, n