"In the Harriton family graveyard, first, sitting on the steps over the wall and listening to a woodthrush. Did you ever have enough?" Esther added, lighting a lamp as she spoke, while the brass teakettle winked in the soft light and the outside earth vanished. "Hilda, it's a good world." "A well-enough world," answered Hilda crossing the yellow patch to get the delicate cups. As she returned with them Esther studied her black serge skirt and caught it up. "Cat-hairs!" she affirmed. "How was Helen?--I've not seen her for a long time. And how was Pasht? He has a black soul." "He's uncommonly beautiful. If you go to Chapel to-morrow," said Hilda irrelevantly, "you will hear the President announce that I am appointed a Reader in English for next year. Pretty good, isn't it, for a Canadian who is Scotch?" "That's all right, Doctor Railton," murmured Esther congratulating her and adding, "Then I'm sure of you here next year." This was before the days of Low Buildings, and Readers lived in the Halls where and how they could. Esther lay back in her chair, admiring the tarnished frame of a quaint oval mirror that reflected a really admirable Japanese water-colour of Hilda's. She was glad the study would be unchanged another year, and quiet. She thought, too, with a little shudder of the hot bad air of crowded rooms, the loud noise of voices, the indecorous bustle of a life made up of many acquaintances. "I am going to Spain this summer to look at some Arabic manuscripts," she said at length. "You'd better come too. If we cross cheaply and don't travel we can live on nothing. Berenson says the Spanish galleries are full of wonderful pictures, practically unknown." "My dear, I've a family," laughed Hilda ruefully. "Didn't you say last night that they were going to the winds of heaven this year and that you didn't know what to do? Represent to them, moreover, that one shouldn't lose so superb a chance of _doing_ me. Seriously, I shall take a whole stateroom, not having forgotten the seasick German girl I came home with last time, and you'd much better occupy the other berth. Indeed, I can't travel alone in Spain, you know." Her eyes were fixed on eighteen square inches of pinkish brocade pinned against the wall--her Christmas present to Hilda and a ruinous extravagance. A chance word, from a lecture, she had caught up and fancied once, came back: "Nobody frames the multiplication table and hangs it on the wall." But surely that was because the multiplication table was shallow and petty and strikingly untrue: there were tracts of knowledge infinite and unfathomable where one would never tire. The things, she realized, which one does not ask too much of--and the people--are the things which are forever surprising one with unguessed possibilities.