e promised to hire horses and trot out Gratian over the Downs."

Mrs. Arundel felt that to say anything more would be worse than useless,
and yet, as she watched her brother lounge across the road and stand on
the slope looking over the river, her eyes filled with tears.

"To think what he _might_ have been. May God guard my boy from men like
him."

Gilbert had gone quickly away from Sion Hill, and found himself on the
lower Downs--then not skirted by handsome houses, but with glades and
grassy slopes covered with hawthorn bushes, whitened in May-time with
blossoms like snow, and covered in autumn with feathery masses of the
wild clematis, or traveller's joy.

Gilbert found the place suited his mood, and he gave himself up to
thoughts of Joyce, and forgot the late encounter with his uncle.

How delightful it was to build castles for the future--to think of a
home near all this loveliness, where Joyce would reign in all her sweet
beauty as his wife. The time had been when Gilbert had admired his
cousin Gratian Anson, who was the daughter of his mother's aunt, and
therefore his cousin only in the second degree. Now her free, bold
bearing, her ringing voice, her fashionable dress and banter, jarred on
him. Her laugh was like the rattle of a noisy brook over innumerable
stones, when compared to Joyce's musical ripple, which was so real, and
so entirely the outcome of her own happiness. Then how charming was her
unconsciousness, and how her beauty was enhanced by the absence of all
affectation; how pretty was her affection for her father and Piers, and
how gracefully and simply she did all the little household duties which
her mother expected from her! Some words of a favourite poet of his
mother's recurred to him, as he pictured Joyce in her little, short,
lilac frock, with an apron, as he had seen her one morning, and her
round white arms bare, as she came out of the dairy, and said she had
made up twenty pats of butter while he had been asleep. Surely George
Herbert's words were verified.

The action was made fine by the spirit, which was done as a loving token
of obedience to the will of another.

"Mother wished me to do it, so I got up an hour earlier," she had said,
as she cut a slice from one of the rolls made for breakfast and offered
it to him, spread with the butter she had made, with a cup of milk,
before it had been skimmed.

Dreams of first love are very sweet; and Gilbert wondered if he had been
wise t