s a great, an
unexpected blow. Who could have foreseen such a result of the morning's
eloquence.

"The truth is," said Mr. Gresley, tremulously, "that they can't and
won't hear reason. They can't controvert what I say, so they take refuge
in petty spite like this. I must own I am disappointed in Walsh. He is a
man of some education, and liberal as regards money. I had thought he
was better than most of them, and now he turns on me like this."

"It's a way worms have," said Hester.

"Oh, don't run a simile to death, Hester," said Mr. Gresley,
impatiently. "If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning
you would have seen I only used the word _worm_ figuratively. I never
meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to
misunderstand me. Worms pay school-rates! Such folly is positively
sickening, if it were not malicious."

Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at
the incident.

As the church-bell stopped the swing-door opened, and Boulou hurried in,
like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing
with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had
been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned.
No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the
Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself _to_ herself" for nearly fifty
years, only to fall the victim of a "grande passion" for Boulou.

The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was
Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the
"shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to
Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the
children there.

"Oh, Regie, we always go there," said Mary, plaintively, who invariably
chose the Pratts' park, with its rustic bridges and _chalets_, which Mr.
Pratt, in a gracious moment, had "thrown open" to the Gresleys on
Sundays, because, as he expressed it, "they must feel so cramped in
their little garden."

But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the "shrubberies" they
went. Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell
them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice
near at hand.

As we grow older we realize that in the new gardens where life leads us
we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in
our old Garden of Eden, round the little gabled house where we