But I could not see the beauty of this lesson now. Selfish love had got me by the button-hole, and there never is much humour in the tale he tells. It is all about himself, and the celestial one who sent him; and he is so much in earnest that he cannot bear a laugh. Even the crinolines in the little narrow window of Messrs. Flounce and Co., where they had to hang alternate, one high and one low, not to poke each other’s ribs, although they reminded me of what I had seen in church, suggested it without a single smile to follow; for my mind, in the reverence of love, was able to people them with the sacred form inside. And yet at any other time I must have laughed, recalling as it did the ingenuity of ladies, who contrived in our narrow pews to reconcile their worship of a Higher Power with that of their own frocks. And the ladies who now go limp may be glad—when fashion comes round in its cycle—to remember how their mothers made the best of it. Each lady alternate stood on a high hassock, each lady intermediate upon the church boards; and so their cages underlapped or overlapped each other; and when it came to kneeling one could hear them all contract. There were quite as clever women then in balloons, as those who end in serpents now. Vainly I looked down the hill, and vainly back at the crinolines. The only way to get the thing desired is to leave off hoping for it. When the sun was gone, and the silver mist was gliding like a slow-worm up the vale, and all the good people of Leatherhead had lit their pipes and come out to talk, I went back slowly to Valley-view, with many a futile turn of head, and ears too ready to be deceived. But the only wheels I heard were those of the fishmonger’s cart going quite the wrong way, for I knew that he had been with a middle cut of salmon to the hospitable gate of Miss Parslow. “You had better go to sleep. Here is Betty, nearly wild,” my aunt cried as she pushed me in; “that blessed butcher has only just sent the lamb, and the boy let it fall in the middle of the road. I hope to goodness she won’t come for two hours. If she does, she will want sandwiches; and there is nothing in the house to make them of. Go and lie down, Kit; don’t you see you are in the way? What a lucky thing I told the man to rest the horses for at least two hours at the _Flowerpot_. When he gets into the tap, he is pretty sure to make it four. You look as white as a ghost, poor boy! Bother that love, it spoils everybody’s dinner! I haven’t got a bit of appetite myself; and the first bit of salmon for the season, except one! Go in, get in; lie down there and roll. Why, you couldn’t even tell where to find the mint!”