t, with the natural pain of losing you. But
she gives her consent, and I venture to endorse it. As chief pastor and
father of the diocese, over which I have so recently come to preside, I
do earnestly commend to you the son of my old friend, Gilbert Arundel. I
propose that you should take a ramble together after service, in the
spring twilight, and when we meet at the evening meal, I hope I may find
you have made my young friend happy."

The Bishop's speech may sound to us unnecessarily long and formal, but,
sixty years ago, the old spirit of chivalrous respect towards maidens,
in approaching the subject of marriage, had not then died out. Perhaps,
also, in the time of the good Bishop, when the first gentleman in Europe
was setting so wretched an example in his behaviour, good and honourable
men felt it the more incumbent on them to give the woman the full
privileges of her position.

Love was to be sought as a favour granted, not claimed in a careless
fashion as a right; while the whole aspect of courtship and marriage was
dealt with more seriously than it is in our day.

Barriers are more easily broken down than set up again, and, perhaps,
there is too great a tendency now-a-days to treat what is grave as a
jest, and to show but little inclination to tread in the paths which
our mothers and grandmothers found safe. Thus the Bishop, when he had
heard from Gilbert's lips the object of his visit to Wells, thought it
his duty to speak to Joyce in the grave manner I have described.

The Bishop rose from his chair, and, laying his hand on Joyce's head,
solemnly pronounced a blessing, and, with crimson cheek and bowed head,
she left him, to prepare to go to the afternoon service.

Later in the day, the supreme moment in her young life came, when she
walked with Gilbert in the fields towards Dinder, turning to the left,
where, in a tangled copse, the first budding flowers of the starry
celandines were peeping amidst fallen leaves and mosses.

The clustering primrose buds were hardly yet showing themselves amongst
their crinkled leaves, and only the upright stems of the alders, and the
lowest boughs of the maples and hazel bushes displayed the first emerald
green of spring. It was a time and place for the exchange of first young
love, and confidences never to be forgotten.

And in all the changes and chances of her future life, Joyce could look
back to that first spring afternoon, and say from her heart that it was
the