The day after the family dinner was hopelessly wet; so the expedition to Shottery, proposed by Edgar Turchill and seconded by Daphne, was indefinitely postponed. The summer fleeted by, the beautiful bounteous summer, with her lap full of sweet-scented flowers; the corn grew tall, the hay was being carted in many a meadow within sound of Stratford bells; and the woods began to put on that look of dull uniform green which indicates the beginning of the end. For the sisters at South Hill, for Gerald Goring and Edgar Turchill, July and August had been one long holiday. There was so little in life for these young people to do except take their pleasure. Theirs was an existence of perpetual rose-gathering; and the roses of life budded and bloomed for them with an inexhaustible fertility. Perhaps Madoline was the only one among them who had any idea of duty. Edgar was an affectionate son, a good master, and a liberal landlord, but he had never been called upon to sacrifice his own inclinations for the welfare of others, and he had never given his mind to any of the graver questions of the day. To him it mattered very little how the labouring classes as a body were taught and housed, so long as the peasants on his own land had decent cottages, and were strangers to want. It irked him not whether the mass of mankind were Jews or Gentiles, Ritualists, Dissenters, or rank unbelievers, so long as he sat in the old cloth-lined family pew on Sunday morning assisting at the same service which had been all-sufficient for his father, and seeing his dependents deporting themselves discreetly in their places in the gallery. His life was a narrow life, travelling in a narrow path that had been worn for him by the footsteps of his ancestors. He was a good man in a limited way. But he had never read the modern gospel, according to Thomas Carlyle, which after all is but an expansion of the Parable of the Talents: and he knew not that every man must work after some fashion or other, and do something for the time in which he lives. He was so thoroughly honest and true-hearted, that if the narrowness and uselessness of his life had been revealed to him, he would assuredly have girded his loins and taken up the pilgrim’s staff. Never having had any such revelation he took his pleasure as innocently as a school-boy at home for the holidays, and had no idea that he was open to the same reproach which that man received who had buried the wealth entrusted to him.