‘It appears to me, Lady Renshaw,’ he began, ‘speaking from a professional point of view, that you are gifted with one of those highly-strung, super-sensitive, and poetical organisations which render those who possess them peculiarly susceptible to all beautiful influences whether of nature or of art. Hem.’ ‘How thoroughly you understand me, Dr M‘Murdo!’ responded her ladyship, beaming on him with one of her broadest smiles. The vicar took off his spectacles and proceeded to rub them vigorously with his handkerchief. ‘Mac, you are nothing better than a barefaced humbug,’ he whispered to himself. ‘It would seem only natural, my dear madam,’ resumed the unblushing doctor, ‘that a temperament such as yours, which throbs responsive to beauty in all its thousand varied forms as readily as an Æolian harp responds to the faintest sigh of the summer breeze, should—should find an outlet for itself in one form or other. Have you never, may I ask, attempted to pour out your thick crowding fancies in verse? Have you never, while gazing on some such scene as this, felt as if you could float away on—on the wings of Poesy? Have you never, in brief, felt as if you could only find relief by rushing into song? Hem.’ The poor vicar fairly gasped for breath. ‘Yes, yes; that is exactly how I have felt a thousand times,’ gushed her ladyship. ‘At such moments I seem to exhale poetry.’ ‘Dear me! rather a remarkable phenomenon,’ murmured Miss Pen. ‘I long to be a dryad—or a nymph—or one of Dian’s huntresses in some Arcadian grove of old.’ ‘A nymph! Hum,’ remarked the vicar softly to himself. ‘But I have never yet ventured to—to’—— ‘Gush into song,’ suggested Miss Pen. ‘To attempt to clothe my thoughts in rhythmic measures,’ went on her ladyship with a little wave of the hand, as though deprecating interruption, ‘although I have often felt an inward voice which impelled me to do so.’ ‘Let me advise you to try, my dear madam,’ resumed the doctor with his gravest professional air. ‘If I may be allowed to say so, you have the eye of a poet—dreamy, imaginative, with a sort of far-away gaze in it, as though you were looking at something a long way off which nobody but yourself could see.’ ‘Ought I to listen to these things in silence?’ asked the vicar of himself with a sudden qualm of conscience. ‘You are a great, naughty flatterer, Dr M‘Murdo,’ said the widow, shaking a podgy finger archly at him. ‘Madam, that is one of the points on which my education has been shamefully neglected.’ She turned with a smile. ‘I trust that our dear vicar is also a worshipper of the beautiful?’ ‘With Lady Renshaw before my eyes, it would be rank heresy to doubt it,’ stammered the dear old boy with a blush that would have become a lad of eighteen. ‘Pass up one, Septimus,’ whispered his sister in his ear. ‘If you talk to me in that strain, I shall begin to think you a very, very dangerous man,’ simpered her ladyship.