trusted to put out any fire--give it time. And he kept a
special vessel in a special corner which recorded for him faithfully the
number of inches that fell; and now and again he wrote to his paper to
say that there were more inches in his vessel than there had been "for
thirty years." His conviction that the country was in a bad way was
nothing but a skin affection, causing him local irritation rather than
affecting the deeper organs of his substantial body.

He did not readily confide in Clara concerning his own family, having
in a marked degree the truly domestic quality of thinking it superior
to his wife's. She had been a Tomson, not one of THE Tomsons, and it was
quite a question whether he or she were trying to forget that fact the
faster. But he did say to her as he was getting into the car:

"It's just possible I might go round by Tod's on my way home. I want a
run."

She answered: "Be careful what you say to that woman. I don't want her
here by any chance. The young ones were quite bad enough."

And when he had put in his day at the works he did turn the nose of his
car toward Tod's. Travelling along grass-bordered roads, the beauty of
this England struck his not too sensitive spirit and made him almost
gasp. It was that moment of the year when the countryside seems to faint
from its own loveliness, from the intoxication of its scents and sounds.
Creamy-white may, splashed here and there with crimson, flooded the
hedges in breaking waves of flower-foam; the fields were all buttercup
glory; every tree had its cuckoo, calling; every bush its blackbird or
thrush in full even-song. Swallows were flying rather low, and the sky,
whose moods they watch, had the slumberous, surcharged beauty of a
long, fine day, with showers not far away. Some orchards were still in
blossom, and the great wild bees, hunting over flowers and grasses warm
to their touch, kept the air deeply murmurous. Movement, light, color,
song, scent, the warm air, and the fluttering leaves were confused, till
one had almost become the other.

And Stanley thought, for he was not rhapsodic 'Wonderful pretty country!
The way everything's looked after--you never see it abroad!'

But the car, a creature with little patience for natural beauty, had
brought him to the crossroads and stood, panting slightly, under
the cliff-bank whereon grew Tod's cottage, so loaded now with lilac,
wistaria, and roses that from the road nothing but a peak or two of the