He passed into the garden and loitered there, recalling the notes after a tuneless fashion of his own. The neglected grounds, which had seemed so sodden and sad when first he looked out upon them, had a pale, shining beauty as he walked to and fro, keeping time to the memory of Barbara's music. The eye did not dwell on their desolation, but passed through the leafless boughs to bright misty distances of earth and cloudland. Reynold halted at last by the old sun-dial. The softly diffused radiance marked no passing hour upon it, but rather seemed to tell of measureless rest and peace. There was a slight autumnal fragrance in the air, but the young man perceived a sweeter breath, and stooping to the black earth, he found two or three violets half hidden in their clustering leaves. He hardly knew why they gave him the pleasure they did; he was not accustomed to find such delicate pleasure in such things. Perhaps if he had analysed his feelings he might have seen that, for a man who had just pledged himself to a life of hurrying toil, there was a subtle charm in the very stillness and decay and indolent content of Mitchelhurst, breathing its odours of box and yew into the damp, windless air. It was a curious little pause before the final plunge. Reynold felt it even if he did not altogether understand, as he stood by the sun-dial which recorded nothing, with the violets at his feet, and the rooks sailing overhead across the faintly-tinted sky. A clump of overgrown dock-leaves stirred suddenly, Barbara's cat pushed its way through them and came to rub itself against him. He bent down and caressed it. "I'll come again--I'll come home," he said softly, as he stroked its arching back. CHAPTER IX. OF MAGIC LANTERNS. It was fortunate that young Harding demanded little in the way of gaiety from Mitchelhurst. Such as it could give, however, it gave that evening, when the vicar, and a country squire who had a small place five or six miles away, came to dinner. The clergyman was a pallid, undersized man, who blinked, and twitched his lips when he was not speaking, and had a nervous trick of assenting to every proposition with an emphatic "Yes, yes." After the utterance of this formula his conscience usually awoke, and compelled him to protest, for he considered most things that were said or done in the world as at any rate slightly reprehensible. This might happen ten times in one conversation, but the assent did not fail to come as readily the tenth time as the first. It would only have been necessary to say, with a sufficient air of conviction, "You see, don't you, Mr. Pryor, that under these circumstances I was perfectly justified in cutting my grandmother's throat with a blunt knife?" to secure a fervent "Yes, yes!" in reply.