uch a deep and high--indeed a
perfect thing! I take pleasure without an atom of shame in every rich
thing you have brought me. Do you think, if you died, and I carried your
watch, I should ever cease to feel the watch was yours? Just so they are
your ponies; and if you don't like me to say so, you can contradict me
every time, you know, all the same."

"I know people will think I am like the lady we heard of the other day,
who told her husband the sideboard was hers, not his. Thomas, I _hate_
to look like the rich one, when all that makes life worth living for, or
fit to be lived, was and is given me by you."

"No, no, no, my darling! don't say that; you terrify me. I was but the
postman that brought you the good news."

"Well! and what else with me and the ponies and the money and all that?
Did I make the ponies? Or did I even earn the money that bought them? It
is only the money my father and brother have done with. Don't make me
look as if I did not behave like a lady to my own husband, Thomas."

"Well, my beautiful, I'll make up for all my wrongs by ordering you
about as if I were the Marquis of Saluzzo, and you the patient Grisel."

"I wish you would. You don't order me about half enough."

"I'll try to do better. You shall see."

Nestley was a lovely place, and the house was old enough to be quite
respectable--one of those houses with a history and a growth, which are
getting rarer every day as the ugly temples of mammon usurp their
places. It was dusky, cool, and somber--a little shabby, indeed, which
fell in harmoniously with its peculiar charm, and indeed added to it. A
lawn, not immaculate of the sweet fault of daisies, sank slowly to a
babbling little tributary of the Lythe, and beyond were fern-covered
slopes, and heather, and furze, and pine-woods. The rector was a
sensible Englishman, who objected to have things done after the taste of
his gardener instead of his own. He loved grass like a village poet, and
would have no flower-beds cut in his lawn. Neither would he have any
flowers planted in the summer to be taken up again before the winter. He
would have no cockney gardening about his place, he said. Perhaps that
was partly why he never employed any but his old cottagers about the
grounds; and the result was that for half the show he had twice the
loveliness. His ambition was to have every possible English garden
flower.

As soon as his visitors arrived, he and his curate went away together,
an