Rachel loved the quiet times she had when Luke and his friend went for excursions. She would sit in the little garden belonging to the house in which were their rooms, and try with her paint brush to produce the wonderful effects of cloud and sunshine on the hills opposite to her. She had not touched her paint brush since her marriage, and she revelled in sketching. While she sketched, her thoughts were busy with the past and future. She looked back in her year of married life and was conscious of the change it had wrought in her. She found it almost difficult to believe that she was the same girl who had lived such a happy uneventful life in her country home. In those days her time had been taken up with riding, driving, gardening and tennis. She had had few thoughts for anything outside her home. She had very little knowledge of the world and its sorrows; and scarcely any suspicion of its sins and wickedness. It seemed now to her as if she had been living in a happy dream. But what she had learned from the little parish work that she had done, and from the pained expression again and again on her husband's face, was enough to make her realise something of the strain and stress of life and of its misery and sin. She would gladly have been without the knowledge that she had gathered since her marriage, had it not been, that she was able to realise more what it all meant to Luke, and to sympathise with him. Life seemed a different thing to her to what it had been at home, and it made her long to be able to stretch out a helping hand to those who were tasting its bitterness. But she was willing now to wait till the way was made plain for her to do all that she longed to do; and till she was more ready for the work.