The view on which she so resolutely turned her back in order to give this timely warning to the literary ladies of Wroxton against theological, or rather infidel, novels, justified her minute’s contemplation. The lawn, a cool, restful space of sober green, sloped down to a prattling tributary of the chalk stream which ran through the town, and in the dusk the flower-beds (the Canon’s hobby was gardening) glowed with subdued and darkening colour. The scent of the tobacco-plant (like Adam and Eve, still in its garden innocence) came floating in through the window, dominating all other perfumes. Thrushes still called to each other from the bushes, or crossed the lawn with quick, scudding steps, and an owl floated by with a flute-like note. To the right rose the gray piled mass of the Cathedral in all the dignity and sobriety of Norman work, set there, it might seem, like the rainbow, a pledge to the benignity of the circling seasons, serene and steadfast with centuries of service. From here, too, for the drawing-room was on the second floor, it was possible to see over the bounding garden-wall, and westward the river lay in sheets and pools of cloud-reflected crimson. Patches of light mist lay like clothes to dry over the water-meadows through which it ran, but beyond the great chalk down lay clear and naked. The sky at the horizon was cloudless, and the evening star hung like a jewel on blue velvet. Peaceful, protected stability was the keynote of the scene. Canon Collingwood had been at Wroxton for twenty mildly useful but not glorious years. From the years between the ages of twenty and forty he had lived entirely at Cambridge as Fellow and subsequently classical tutor of his college. The effect, if not the object, of his life had been uneventfulness, and twenty years of looking over pieces of Latin verse and prose had been succeeded by twenty years of busy indolence as Canon of Wroxton. To keep one’s hands and heart moderately clean in this random business of life is a sufficient task for the most of mankind, and if Canon Collingwood had not experienced the braver joys of adventure, or even the rapture of mere living, it is not to be assumed that his life was useless. He set an admirable pattern of unruffled serenity and complete inoffensiveness, and though he could never set the smallest stream on fire, his passage through the world was bordered with content. At Wroxton, apart from the merely animal needs of sleep and exercise, his time was fairly equally divided between hardy annuals and an extensive though not profound study of patristic literature. Eight times in the year he delivered a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and never failed to give careful preparation to it. In the summer he and his wife always spent a month at the lakes, but otherwise they seldom slept a night outside their own house. He got up every morning at half past seven, and breakfasted at a quarter past eight. He attended