Nora kissed him lightly on the high forehead as she ran toward the open French window. Rather to her surprise, the customary caress seemed to arouse her father from his reflections. He looked up and blinked, like a man who is trying to remember some important matter. "My dear," he said, before Nora had reached the lawn, "is it really true that you want to go abroad? Your mother was talking to me about it last night." "We were thinking about it," Nora admitted, fidgeting nervously with the blind-cord. "Mother said she thought it would be good for me." "But, my dear child, what shall we do without you?" her father complained. Nora made an almost imperceptible movement of impatience. She knew of what her father was thinking, and it did not move her to any great degree of sympathy. "You will manage all right," she said. "Mr. Clerk will help you with your letters." And then, to cut the conversation short, she went out into the garden and along the gravel pathway towards the road. The sun shone gloriously. All the charm of an English summer morning lay in the air, and Nora drew in great breaths with a joyous, unconscious triumph in her own fresh youth and health. The garden was the one place in the village which she really loved. The ugly, modern red-brick church, the straggling "square," with its peppermint bull’s-eye monument to some past "glorious victory," in which the inhabitants of Delford were dimly supposed to have had their honourable share, the stuffy cottages, interspersed here and there by an ivy-overgrown residence of some big-wig of the neighbourhood—these features were unaccountably connected in Nora’s mind with her father’s sermons, the drone of the organ, and the dull piety of Sundays. But the garden was all her mother’s. Nora believed that within its peaceful limits the forgotten and despised fairies of ancient lore took refuge from the matter-of-fact bigots who formed Delford’s most respectable community. She had even christened a certain rose-corner the "Fairy Castle," and it amused her riotous young fancy to imagine an indignant and horrified Queen Mab scampering across the lawn in disorganised flight, before the approach of the enemy in the form of Mrs. Clerk, the curate’s wife, or Mrs. Chester of the Manor. The garden was, as it were, Mrs. Ingestre’s self-created Eden in the drab-coloured land of the Philistines, and even the Rev. John was an intruder and disturber of its poetic peace. Nora felt all this, and in a dim, unformed way understood why her mother’s roses were different to the roses in other and richer gardens, why the very atmosphere had its own peculiar perfume, the silence its own peculiar mystery. She felt that her mother had translated herself into the flowers, and that the depths of her quiet, unfathomable heart were revealed in their beauty and sweetness. She felt that if she could have read their language, the very daisies on the