She resented Mr. Pryor's professional allusions to the uncertainty of life. There are moments so perfect that they ought not to be degraded by thoughts of disease and death, ought not to be measured or weighed in any way whatever. Barbara felt this, and she thrust aside the clergyman's lecture as soon as he left the room. Let him talk of such things to Uncle Hayes. As for her, she lingered at the window, thinking of her newly-found happiness, while she gazed at the hoary fields, with their black boundaries of railing or leafless hedge, till a faint pink flush crept over the pale sky, as if it were softly suffused with her overflowing joy. Mitchelhurst Place, of which Harding had dreamed so tenderly a few months earlier, as a home for himself and his love, was to the eager girl at that moment only a charnel-house, full of death and clinging memories, from which she panted to escape. It was true that she had first met Adrian Scarlett there, but she had the whole world in which to meet him again. "And he will always know where to find me," she said to herself with a touch of practical common sense in the midst of her rapture. "He can look out papa's name in the Clergy List, any day." CHAPTER VI. A PERPLEXING REFLECTION. The April sun was shining into two pleasant sitting-rooms, only divided by a partially drawn curtain. Their long windows opened on a wide gravel walk. Beyond this lay a garden, bright with the airy, leafless charm of spring. The grass was grey-green as yet, the borders brown earth, but there were lines and patches of gay spring flowers, and a blithe activity of birds, while the white clouds floated far away in the breezy sky. Adrian Scarlett, who was a guest in the house, came slowly sauntering along one of the sunshiny paths, between the yellow daffodils, with eyes intent on a handful of printed leaves. Now and again he stopped short, trying a different reading of a line, or twisting his little pointed beard with white fingers, while he questioned some doubtful harmony of syllables. Once he took a pencil from his pocket, and with indignant amusement marked a misprint. After each of these pauses he resumed his dreamy progress, unconscious of any wider horizon than the margin of his page.