"Important! Yes, indeed it is important; but nothing to do with the parish. In fact you have forgotten the most important day of our life, anyhow, I count it so. Don't you remember the fifteenth of August last year?" "I'm afraid I don't. What happened? The School treat?" "Something much more important than that. It was our wedding day." Luke laughed. "Our wedding day! Why I feel as if I had always had you. Is it really only a year ago? I was afraid at first that I had forgotten some important engagement." "So you have. It is the most important. It was my first waking thought." "What creatures you women are, always making so much of anniversaries." Rachel laughed. "I am afraid after all you are a thoroughly prosaic man. I thought you were full of romance and beautiful things when I married you. You must not grow prosaic or we shall be just like all the other dull couples that we so often meet." "How can I think of anniversaries when I have 6,000 souls under my charge." "You can think of them very well, that is to say if marriage is the sacred thing I always thought it was. Don't you remember the words in Aurora Leigh?" "'Beloved, let us work so well Our work shall be the better for our love, And still our love be sweeter for our work.'" "Don't give up loving, Luke." "Give up loving!" said Luke amazed. "Why, you are all the world to me." "Then tell me so sometimes," said Rachel. "Wives need to be told. If not they, the husband and wife I mean, drift into such commonplace, humdrum, phlegmatic married couples." Luke laughed. He had not noticed the slight tremor in her voice. "By-the-bye," he said, "I hope I shall get a letter from West to-morrow about the estimate of the new gas stove to be put in the chancel." Rachel, who had been watching the changing shadows on the mountains, now turned and looked at him. Was he really thinking about gas stoves! Then she laughed, and he vaguely wondered what she found to amuse her in gas stoves. They were silent till they arrived at the end of the Lake. Then Rachel said, "Just look at those lovely pink clouds and their reflection. Isn't it perfectly heavenly?" On getting no answer she looked again at Luke; but the expression of his face convinced her that the beauty was quite lost upon him; his horizon was still filled with gas stoves.