t of research. Nor from her elder sister Hannah, whose
neuralgic sick headaches were a martyrdom to herself, but apparently
a source of pride to her family. Of which the inflation, strange to
say, was the greater because Dr. Knox was of opinion that they would
yield to treatment and tonics; though the old lady herself was opposed
to both, and said elder-flower-water. She was a pleasant old personage,
Mrs. Gattrell, who always shone out as a beacon of robust health above
a fever-stricken, paralysed, plague-spotted, debilitated, and
disintegrating crowd of blood-relations and connexions by marriage.
But not one of all these had ever left the soil they were born on,
none of Mrs. Gattrell's people holding with foreign parts. And nothing
whatever had ever taken place at St. Egbert's till the railway come;
so it wasn't likely to arouse memories of the ice-fields of the
northern cold or the tiger-hunts of the southern heat.

Rosalind found herself asking of each new thing as it arose: "Will
this bring anything fresh to his mind, or will it pass?" The wood-path
the nut-tree growth all but closed over on either side she decided
was safe; it could taste of nothing but his English school-boyhood,
before ever she knew him. But the sudden uprush of the covey of
partridges from the stubble, and their bee-line for a haven in the
next field--surely danger lay that way? Think what a shot he was in the
old days! However, he only said, "Poor dears, they don't know how near
the thirty-first is," and seemed to be able to know that much from
past experience without discomfort at not knowing more.

When Sally proposed fortune-telling in connexion with a _bona-fide_
gipsy woman, who looked (she said) exactly like in "Lavengro," her
mother's first impulse was to try and recall if she and the Gerry
of old times had ever been in contact with gipsies, authentic or
otherwise, and, after decision in the negative, to feel that this
wanderer was more welcome than not, as having a tendency to conduct
his mind safely into new channels. Even the conclave of cows he had
to disperse that they might get through a gate--cows that didn't mind
how long they waited at it, having time on their hands--suggested the
same kind of query. She was rapidly getting to look at everything
from the point of view of what it was going to remind her husband
of. She must struggle against the habit that was forming, or it
would become insupportable. But then, again, the though