least anxiety concerning his parents’ clothes or manners when they had visited him; probably he thought all clothes and all manners, like all ideas, were very nice, in their different ways. But when Daphne came in, tweed-skirted, and clad in a blue golfer and cap, and prettily flushed by the keen air to the colour of a pink shell, her quick eyes took in every detail of Jane’s attire before she was introduced, and her mother guessed a suppressed twinkle in her smile. Mrs. Oliver hoped Daphne was going to be polite to these visitors. She was afraid Daphne was in a rather perverse mood towards Eddy’s friends. Denison, of course, she frankly disliked, and did not make much secret of it. He was conceited, plain, his hair untidy, his collar low, and his manners supercilious. Denison was well equipped for taking care of himself; those who came to blows with him rarely came off best. He behaved very well at tea, knowing, as Eddy had said, that it was a Deanery. But he was annoying once. Someone had given Mrs. Oliver at Christmas a certain book, containing many beautiful and tranquil thoughts about this world, its inhabitants, its origin, and its goal, by a writer who had produced, and would, no doubt, continue to produce, very many such books. Many people read this writer constantly, and got help therefrom, and often wrote and told him so; others did not read him at all, not finding life long enough; others, again, read him sometimes in an idle moment, to get a little diversion. Of these last was Arnold Denison. When he put his tea-cup down on the table at his side, his eye chanced on the beautiful book lying thereon, and he laughed a little. “Which one is that? Oh, _Garden Paths_. That’s the last but two, isn’t it.” He picked it up and turned the leaves, and chuckled at a certain passage, which he proceeded to read aloud. It had, unfortunately, or was intended to have, a philosophical and more or less religious bearing (the writer was a vague but zealous seeker after truth); also, more unfortunately still, the Dean and his wife knew the author; in fact, he had stayed with them often. Eddy would have warned Arnold of that had he had time, but it was too late. He could only now say, “I call that very interesting, and jolly well put.”