In the after-days, the pair stood in the same spot again on just such another afternoon, and thought of that talk on their way to Kemms church. “We shall be very late,” Bessie said at length; and then they turned and pursued their way in the delicious stillness across the fields to North Kemms. It had been a freak of Bessie’s, this Sunday ramble alone with Alick to a far-away church; but then Bessie was given to freaks, and no one paid any particular attention to them. Mrs. Ormson declared such a walk in the heat of the day “was absurd;” even Heather looked surprised when she and Alick announced their intention of starting directly after dinner. Lally had implored “me too,” for once vainly, and an offer of companionship from the remainder of the Dudleys had met with no better success. “I want to go alone with you, Alick,” she declared. “I want to talk to you quietly;” and of course Alick was delighted. Like most girls, Bessie conceived all the wisdom of Solomon had come down to her. In the ways of this world the young lady believed she was a thorough adept; but she had not that reticence in talking about the ways of the world and the wickedness of the people in it, which is, perhaps, the first sign of thorough knowledge. The wise man is modest. The man who thinks himself wise lacks sense to hold his tongue; the saint is eloquent about sin; the sinner is not given to speak of the flavour of that strange meat whereof he has partaken; for all of which reasons Bessie, who was but a very novice in that lore wherein she aspired to instruct others, was assiduous in her endeavours to teach Alick that the world where he had been placed was a mistake, the hope of happiness in it a delusion and a snare. This young woman, who delighted in every country sight and sound, who loved Lally and adored Heather Dudley, who luxuriated in pleasant sights and in all sweet sounds, who had her life all before her, who could take fun out of most things, and was not above confessing to a weakness for strawberries and cream, would nevertheless talk on a fine summer afternoon as I have taken the liberty of transcribing her conversation. She thought she was original, perhaps, in her remarks; she thought also possibly—and this thought chanced to be perfectly true—that Alick Dudley delighted in her observations; and yet her talk was but as the talk of other girls of her own age and temperament throughout the length and breadth of England. It was the nought is everything and everything is nought creed of our own girls at the present hour; of those who, whether they take refuge from their own luxuriously sad thoughts in earnestness or frivolity, in balls or soup-kitchens, in fashionable follies or house-to-house visitings, are yet agreed on one point, viz., their conviction that the round world and all that therein is cannot be considered otherwise than hollow and unsatisfactory.