Perfect mistress of her boat, Daphne revelled in the lonely delight of the river. She felt no grief at the loss of Mr. Turchill’s company. He had been very kind to her, he had been altogether devoted and unselfish, and the gipsy breakfasts in the old boat-house had been capital fun. But these delights would have palled in time; while the languid pleasure of drifting quietly down the stream, thinking her own thoughts, dreaming her own dreams, could never know satiety. She was so full of thoughts, sweet thoughts, vague fancies, visions of an impossible future, dreams which made up half her life. What did it matter that this airy fantastic castle she had built for herself was no earthly edifice, that she could never live in it, or be any nearer it than she was to-day? To her the thing existed, were it only in dreamland; it was a part of herself and of her life, it was of more consequence to her than the commonplace routine of daily existence—the dressing, and dining, and driving, and visiting. Had her life been more varied, full of duty, or even diversified by the frivolous activity of pleasure, she could not have thus given herself up to dreaming. But she had few pleasures and no duties. Madoline held her absolved from every care and every trouble on the ground of her youth. She did not like parish work of any kind; she hated the idea of visiting the poor; so Madoline held her excused from that duty, as from all others. Her mind would awaken to the serious side of life when she was older, her sister thought. She seemed now to belong to the flowers and butterflies, and the fair ephemeral things of the garden. Thus Daphne, ignored by her father, indulged by her sister, enjoyed a freedom which is rarely accorded to a girl of seventeen. Her Aunt Rhoda looked on and disapproved, and hoped piously that she would come to no harm, and was surprised at Lina’s weakness, and thought Daphne’s bright little boat a blot upon the landscape when it came gliding down the river below the Rectory windows. The parson’s rich glebe was conterminous with Sir Vernon Lawford’s property, and Daphne hardly knew where her father’s fields ended or where the church fields began. Edgar Turchill, degraded from his post of instructor, still contrived to spend a considerable portion of his life at South Hill. If he was not there for lawn-tennis in the afternoon, with the Rector’s wife for a fourth, he was there in the evening for billiards. He fetched and carried for Madoline, rode over to Warwick to get her a new book, or to Leamington to match a skein of crewel. There was no commission too petty for him, no office too trivial or lowly, so that he might be permitted to spend his time with the sisters. Daphne thought this devotedness a bad sign, and began to fear that the canker was at his heart, and that he would die for love of Madoline when the fortunate Gerald came home to claim her.