he was playing his part in this simple society, doing his social duty, much amused and often tickled by the oddity of all its novel ways. He had meant all along, when those duties had been done, and when he had shown himself the amiable young squire, friendly and accessible, to go to Lady William and laugh with her over the humours of Watcham. She would understand all that. She knew the other point of view, and how odd it must all seem in the eyes of the cosmopolitan, who knew French curés better than English churchmen, and to whom the rural parish was the quaintest thing. But in the meantime this last encounter was not in the harmony of the rural parish; there was another element, a tone of the more meretricious drama, a sort of Porte St. Martin, he said to himself, thrown in. Somehow that which was so much more exciting seemed vulgar to him in this quiet place. It was all so tranquil here and seemed so pure, that the other tone of the fictitious and conventional came in with a shock. Porte St. Martin, that was what this woman was. Whereas there was nothing here that savoured of the theatre in any way, but all pure nature and simplicity, and real, though to him almost inconceivable life. He went on all the same, even after this shock, to Lady William, with a wonderful comfort in finding that here was somebody who would understand him when he spoke. The cottage looked more ridiculously small than ever when he reached it. The Rectory, and the red brick mansions on the other side, were large in comparison with this little place standing lowly in its garden, with the trees hanging over it, and all the crop of climbing plants with the spring sap pushing up through their long shoots, and their new leaves forming. He almost stumbled over the gate, and felt that to step over it would be more natural than to open it and go in. Mab was in the garden busy about some new flower beds, at which she was working with a child’s spade and trowel. She lifted her honest simple face flushed with work, and laughed that she could not offer him such a dirty hand. ‘I have been grubbing,’ she said, ‘but mother is in the drawing-room.’ Her face was not only flushed, which sounds well enough, but red, and her fair hair a little in disorder from stooping over her ‘grubbing.’ Her plump arm was half bare, and looked very capable of work. She was a girl totally unconscious as yet of anything that was not homely and actual, not a budding woman with nerves and feelings, ready to thrill at a new presence. Whether it were Leo Swinford or any old woman that came in, it was quite the same to Mab. She laughed and pointed behind her to the tiny house, and the little open window. Even Emmy Plowden at the Rectory in all her English shyness and correctness might have made a timid effort to detain him a moment, to exchange a single word or two; but not Mab, who wanted to be rid of him simply, or even did not want that so much as to care whether he went or came.