amine Barbara with critical care,
and with a discontented eye, though to a stranger her appearance would
seem likely to inspire any feeling rather than dissatisfaction, for she
looks as clean and fair and chastely sweet as ever maiden did. Ben
Jonson must have known some one like her when he wrote:

"Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver
Or swan's-down ever?
Or have smelled of the bud of the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
Oh so white, oh so soft, oh so sweet is she?"

But all the same, having a bonnet on, she is distinctly less like Palma
Vecchio's St. Catherine, to which in my talk with Frank I compared her,
than she was bareheaded this morning at breakfast. Who in the annals of
history ever heard of a saint in a _bonnet_?

"I wish that people might be allowed to go to church without their
bonnets these hot Sundays," I say, grumblingly. "_You_ especially,
Barbara."

She laughs.

"I should be very glad, but I am afraid the beadle would turn me out."

"For Heaven's sake," says Algy, gravely, putting back his shoulders and
throwing out his chest, as he draws on a pair of exact gray gloves, "do
not let us make ourselves to stink in the nostrils of the inhabitants by
any eccentricities of conduct, on this our first introduction to them.
If we consulted our own comfort, there is no doubt that we should reduce
our toilets by a good many more articles than a bonnet--in fact--" (with
an air of reflection), "I shudder to think _where_ we should stop!"

We are in church now. I have run the gantlet of the observation of all
the parishioners, and have been unable to look calmly unaware of it; on
the contrary, have grown consciously rosy red, and have walked over
hastily between the open sittings. But now I have reached the shelter of
our own seat, near the top of the church, with all the gay bonnets
behind me, and only the pulpit, the spread-eagle reading-desk, and the
gaudy stained window in front. As soon as I am established--almost
sooner, perhaps--I turn my eyes in search of Mr. Musgrave. I know
perfectly where to look for him, as he drew a plan of Tempest church and
the relative position of our sittings, with the point of his stick on
the gravel in the gardens close to the Zwinger at Dresden, while