"No," said the girl. It was a truthful answer, but her consciousness of the intense scorn in Harding's voice made it doubly prompt. "But do you like going?" She hesitated. "Oh yes, sometimes. I liked going to the harvest home entertainment." "Oh!" A pause. "Did Mr. Scarlett sing 'Simon the Cellarer'?" "No, he did not." After a moment she went on. "They are not always penny readings; a little while ago we had a magic lantern and some sacred music. They were views of the Holy Land, you know, that was why we had sacred music." "Oh!" said Reynold again. "And did you enjoy the views of the Holy Land?" "Well, not so very much," she owned. "They didn't get the light right at first, and they were not very distinct, so he told us all about Bethlehem, and then found out that they had put in the wrong slide, and it was the woman at the well, so they had to change her, and then he told us all about Bethlehem over again. Joppa was the best; a fly got in somewhere and ran about over the roofs of the houses--it looked as big as a cat. I shall always remember about Joppa now. Poor Mr. Pryor began quite gravely--" Barbara paused, turned her head to see that her uncle was sufficiently absorbed, and then softly mimicked the clergyman's manner. "'Joppa, or Jaffa, may be considered the port of Jerusalem. It is built on a conical eminence overhanging the sea'--and then he saw us all whispering and laughing and the fly running about. He told us it wasn't reverent; he was dreadfully cross about it. He stopped while they took Joppa out, and, I suppose, they caught the fly. Anyhow it never got in any more. Oh yes, it was rather amusing altogether." "Was it?" She threw her head back and looked up at him. "You are laughing at me," she said in a low voice, "but it isn't always so very amusing at home." His face softened instantly. "I oughtn't to have laughed," he said. "I ought to know--" He could picture Barbara shut up with her smiling, selfish, unsympathetic little uncle, in the black winter evenings that were coming, all the fancies and dreams of eighteen pent within those white-panelled walls, and exhaling sadly in little sighs of weariness over book or needlework. But he saw another picture too, a dull London sitting-room whose dreariness seemed intensely concentrated on the face of a disappointed woman. Life had held little more for him than for Barbara, but he had rejected even its dreams, and had spent his musing hours in distilling the bitterness of scorn from its sordid realities. He would not have been cheered by a magnified fly. "You are wiser than I am, Miss Strange," he said abruptly. "What do you mean?" "You take what you can get." She considered for a moment. "You mean that I go to Mr. Pryor's entertainments, and hear 'Simon the----'" "Cyrenian! Yes, and see Joppa in a magic lantern. That is very wise when the real Joppa is out of reach." "I don't know," said Barbara hesitatingly, "that I ever very particularly wanted to go to Joppa."