The Gaffer and his race-horses, the Saint and her greenhouse--so went the stream of life at Woodview. What few visitors came were entertained by Miss Mary in the drawing-room or on the tennis lawn. Mrs. Barfield saw no one. She desired to remain in her old gown--an old thing that her daughter had discarded long ago--pinned up around her, and on her head an old bonnet with a faded poppy hanging from the crown. In such attire she wished to be allowed to trot about to and fro from her greenhouse to her potting-shed, watering, pruning, and syringing her plants. These plants were dearer than all things to her except her children; she seemed, indeed, to treat them as if they were children, and with the sun pouring through the glass down on her back she would sit freeing them from devouring insects all the day long. She would carry can after can of water up the long path and never complain of fatigue. She broke into complaint only when Miss Mary forgot to feed her pets, of which she had a great number--rabbits, and cats, and rooks, and all the work devolved upon her. She could not see these poor dumb creatures hungry, and would trudge to the stables, coming back laden with trusses of hay. But it was sometimes more than a pair of hands could do, and she would send Esther with scraps of meat and bread and milk to the unfortunate rooks that Mary had so unmercifully forgotten. "I'll have no more pets," she'd say, "Miss Mary won't look after them, and all the trouble falls upon me. See these poor cats, how they come mewing round my skirts." She loved to expatiate on her inexhaustible affection for dumb animals, and she continued an anecdotal discourse till, suddenly wearying of it, she would break off and speak to Esther about Barnstaple and the Brethren. The Saint loved to hear Esther tell of her father and the little shop in Barnstaple, of the prayer-meetings and the simple earnestness and narrowness of the faith of those good Brethren. Circumstances had effaced, though they had not obliterated, the once sharply-marked confines of her religious habits. Her religion was like a garden--a little less sedulously tended than of yore, but no whit less fondly loved; and while listening to Esther's story she dreamed her own early life over again, and paused, laying down her watering-can, penetrated with the happiness of gentle memories. So Esther's life grew and was fashioned; so amid the ceaseless round of simple daily occupations mistress and maid learned to know and to love one another, and became united and strengthful in the tender and ineffable sympathies of race and religion. V