o a servitorship
at Christ Church, Oxford; and somehow, in the course of one Long
Vacation, had found money for travelling expenses to join a reading
party under the Junior Censor. The party spent six summer weeks at a
farmhouse near Honiton, in Devon. The farm belonged to an invalid
widow named Venning, who let it be managed by her daughter Humility
and two paid labourers, while she herself sat by the window in her
kitchen parlour, busied incessantly with lace-work of that beautiful
kind for which Honiton is famous. He was an unassuming youth; and
although in those days servitors were no longer called upon to black
the boots of richer undergraduates, the widow and her daughter soon
divined that he was lowlier than the others, and his position an
awkward one, and were kind to him in small ways, and grew to like
him. Next year, at their invitation, he travelled down to Honiton
alone, with a box of books; and, at twenty-two, having taken his
degree, he paid them a third visit, and asked Humility to be his
wife. At twenty-four, soon after his admission to deacon's orders,
they were married. The widow sold the small farm, with its stock,
and followed to live with them in the friary gate-house; this having
been part of Humility's bargain with her lover, if the word can be
used of a pact between two hearts so fond.

About ten years had gone since these things happened, and their child
Taffy was now past his eighth birthday.

It seemed to him that, so far back as he could remember, his mother
and grandmother had been making lace continually. At night, when his
mother took the candle away with her and left him alone in the dark,
he was not afraid; for, by closing his eyes, he could always see the
two women quite plainly; and always he saw them at work, each with a
pillow on her lap, and the lace upon it growing, growing, until the
pins and bobbins wove a pattern that was a dream, and he slept.
He could not tell what became of all the lace, though he had a collar
of it which he wore to church on Sundays, and his mother had once
shown him a parcel of it, wrapped in tissue-paper, and told him it
was his christening robe.

His father was always reading, except on Sundays, when he preached
sermons. In his thoughts nine times out of ten Taffy associated his
father with a great pile of books; but the tenth time with something
totally different. One summer--it was in his sixth year--they had
all gone on a holiday to Tewkes