Then, fearing lest he had been too grand about a little matter—not his daughterʼs marriage, but the aspersion upon himself—he closed the door very carefully, so as not to make any noise, and walked away towards his home, forgetting Coræbus utterly. And, before his fine solid face began to recover its healthy and bashful pink, he was visited by sore misgivings as to his own behaviour; to wit, what claim had any man, however elate with the pride of right and the scorn of wrong, to talk about any fellow–man becoming humble to him? Nevertheless, he could not manage to retract the wrong expression in his letter of resignation; not from any false pride—oh no!—but for fear of being misunderstood. But that very night he craved pardon of Him before whom alone we need humbly bow; who alone can grant us anything. CHAPTER IV. What is lovelier, just when Autumn throws her lace around us, and begs us not to begin to think of any spiteful winter, because she has not yet unfolded half the wealth of her bosom, and will not look over her shoulder—when we take that rich one gaily for her gifts of beauty; what among her clustered hair, freshened with the hoar–frost in imitation of the Spring (all fashions do recur so), tell us what can be more pretty, pearly, light, and elegant, more memoried of maidenhood, than a jolly spiderʼs web? See how the diamonds quiver and sparkle in the September morning; what jeweller could have set them so? All of graduated light and metrical proportion, every third pre–eminent, strung on soft aerial tension, as of woven hoar–frost, and every carrying thread encrusted with the breath of fairies, then crossed and latticed at just angles, with narrowing interstices, to a radiated octagon—the more we look, the more we wonder at the perfect tracery. Then, if we gently breathe upon it, or a leaf of the bramble shivers, how from the open centre a whiff of waving motion flows down every vibrant radius, every weft accepts the waft slowly and lulling vibration, every stay–rope jerks and quivers, and all the fleeting subtilty expands, contracts, and undulates. Yet if an elegant spider glide out, exquisite, many–dappled, pellucid like a Scotch pebble or a calceolaria, with a dozen dimples upon his back, and eight fierce eyes all up for business, the moment he slips from the blackberry–leaf all sense of beauty is lost to the gazer, because he thinks of rapacity. And so, I fear, John Rosedewʼs hat described in the air a flourish of more courtesy than cordiality, when he saw Mrs. Corklemore gliding forth from the bend of the road in front of him. Although she had left the house after him, by the help of a short cut through the gardens, where the rector would no longer take the liberty of trespassing, she contrived to meet him as if herself returning from the village. “Oh, Mr. Rosedew, I am so glad to see you,” cried Georgie, as he tried to escape with his bow: “what a fortunate accident!”