n and babes and birds with gladness
and praise, and God never meant it, then are they all idolaters, and
have but a careless Father. Sweet earthy odors rose about Mary from the
wet ground; the rain-drops glittered on the grass and corn-blades and
hedgerows; a soft damp wind breathed rather than blew about the gaps
and gates; with an upward springing, like that of a fountain momently
gathering strength, the larks kept shooting aloft, there, like
music-rockets, to explode in showers of glowing and sparkling song;
while, all the time and over all, the sun as he went down kept shining
in the might of his peace; and the heart of Mary praised her Father in
heaven.

Where the narrow path ran westward for a little way, so that she could
see nothing for the sun in her eyes, in the middle of a plowed field
she would have run right against a gentleman, had he been as blind as
she; but, his back being to the sun, he saw her perfectly, and stepped
out of her way into the midst of a patch of stiff soil, where the rain
was yet lying between the furrows. She saw him then, and as, lifting
his hat, he stopped again upon the path, she recognized Mr. Wardour.

"Oh, your nice boots!" she cried, in the childlike distress of a simple
soul discovering itself the cause of catastrophe, for his boots were
smeared all over with yellow clay.

"It only serves me right," returned Mr. Wardour, with a laugh of
amusement. "I oughtn't to have put on such thin ones at the first smile
of summer."

Again he lifted his hat, and walked on.

Mary also pursued her path, genuinely though gently pained that one
should have stepped up to the ankles in mud on her account. As I have
already said, except in the shop she had never before spoken to Mr.
Wardour, and, although he had so simply responded to her exclamation,
he did not even know who she was.

The friendship which now drew Mary to Thornwick, Godfrey Wardour's
place, was not one of long date. She and Letty Lovel had, it is true,
known each other for years, but only quite of late had their
acquaintance ripened into something better; and it was not without
protestation on the part of Mrs. Wardour, Godfrey's mother, that she
had seen the growth of an intimacy between the two young women. The
society of a shopwoman, she often remarked, was far from suitable for
one who, as the daughter of a professional man, might lay claim to the
position of a gentlewoman. For Letty was the orphan daughter of a
country