The poultry-yard settled, Boz conducted his mistress to the vegetable garden, where Eveline gathered a basket of peas for dinner, some currants and raspberries for dessert, quietly wondering who would gather the fruit from those bushes next year. As she stood among the raspberry bushes her mother came out and went down the garden to the rectory gate. A sharp pain shot through Eveline’s heart. “What will Uncle James say and Aunt Elgitha? Will they persuade mother not to go? I’m sure Uncle James will miss us, and poor Githa!” and the ready tears welled into Eveline’s eyes. “But Mark—to live with Mark, to see him every day—to live in London, to hear beautiful music, to see beautiful pictures, to go to Westminster Abbey, to the Temple, to St. Paul’s!” Eveline sat down among the roses, fairly dazed with the thick-coming thoughts, while the bees hummed, the grasshoppers chirped, and the roses slowly swayed in the west wind that came to them charged with the fragrance of the mignonette. The earth was so fair, the sky so blue, the wind so sweet, what need was there to think of anything but the beauty and the colour and the perfume? Just then a chill wind blew from the north, the leaves shivered, the murmur of the grasshoppers died away under the grass as over the church a huge black cloud came sweeping, while another, jagged and angry, met it from the south, and there came a sound of rolling thunder. Eveline looked in wonder from her bower, the storm had burst so suddenly. Was it an answer to her thought, a warning not to trust in the perishable, not to make pleasure the law of life, but to aim at the imperishable, the eternal? It shot through Eveline’s mind that she might at least take such teaching from it, that if she could grasp the blessings of family love and sisterhood it would be worse than folly to magnify the blessings she must give up for them; but she was glad that the burden of the choice did not lie with her, and making her way into the house, she occupied herself in her usual studies.