fingers rest in contact with it for a moment,-she had pleasant soft

hands;-she began to drift into summer houses with me, to let her

arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge.

They were much the same questions that Sybil had asked. But I

controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and

entirely civil indifference to her blandishments.

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talk-I forget

about what-with Sybil.

"Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, "Dick's Pi."

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this

theory of my innate and virginal piety.

6

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I

think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think

because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the

streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual

disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and

Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the

slender graciousness that shone out so pleasingly against the

bleaker midland surroundings.

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter

of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not

in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a

small hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as

much as is humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work

that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school-

girls. She really learnt French and German admirably and

thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry

can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to

Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the usual conflict with her family, to

work for the History Tripos.

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through

overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go

abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls

do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and

school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining

of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to

see it as a whole, she feltherself not making headway and she cut

her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and

worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious

thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of her subject.

It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is

celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and

soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure

her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed,

and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her

half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years

later, for a journey to Italy.

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of

them had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-

father, played the part of a well-meaning blight by reason of the

moods that arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence,

equipped with various introductions and much sound advice from

sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy

there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned,

if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months

or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem,

in health again and consciously a very civilised person.

New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant

flowers-daffodils were particularly good that year-and Mrs. Seddon

celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short

notice, with the clear intention of letting every one out into the

garden if the weather held.

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of

comfort on the road out towards Misterton, with an orchard that had

been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich

blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of

nodding yellow trumpets had been left amidst the not too precisely

mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse

into lawn or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above

her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to meet our

rather too consciously dressed party,-we had come in the motor four

strong, with my aunt in grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing

flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the

fashion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, unbountiful

Primavera.

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer,

and I remember disconnectedly quite a number of brightly lit figures

and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and

garden and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house

with a verandah and open French windows, through which the tea

drinking had come out upon the moss-edged flagstones even as Mrs.

Seddon had planned.

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate