From the old-fashioned garden beyond comes the scent of the roses—all old-world roses, as befits the garden, but none the less beautiful for that. The rose céleste and the white rose unique, the cabbage rose and the perfect rose of a hundred leaves, all lend their sweetness to the air; indeed, on this June evening the place is ‘on fire with roses.’ The little group sitting on the edge of the tennis-ground seems very happy and contented—lazy, perhaps, is a better word. Susan, as usual, has Bonnie in her lap, and Tom, the baby, has fallen asleep with his head on Betty’s knee. Jacky, still full of memories of the awful burglar he had interviewed in the morning, is wondering whether he will raid the village to-night, and if so, whether he will carry off Aunt Jemima; whilst Carew, the eldest son, who is seventeen, and therefore a year younger than Susan, is lazily dwelling on the best choice of a stream for to-morrow’s fishing. His cousin, Dom Fitzgerald, is the first to break the lovely spell of silence that has fallen on them. He is a cousin of the Barrys, and a nephew of their father and of Miss Jemima Barry also, the Rector’s sister, who, since the death of her sister-in-law, has always lived with them, and who, if a most exemplary person, is certainly what is commonly described as ‘trying.’ The parish of Curraghcloyne is small, the income even smaller. But if Providence, in giving Mr. Barry this parish as his special charge, had been niggardly to him in money matters, it had certainly made up to him lavishly in another respect—it had given him, for example, a large, and what promised to be an ever-increasing, family, so increasing, indeed, that it would ultimately have beaten the record but for the untimely death of Mrs. Barry, who had faded out of life at Tom’s birth. She was then just thirty-two, but she looked forty. To her husband, however, gazing at her dead face, surrounded by its lilies and white roses, she looked seventeen again—the age at which he had married her—and though he was a man entirely wrapped up in his books and theories, it is an almost certain thing that he never forgot her, and that he mourned and lamented for her as few men whose lives are set in smoother places do for their beloved. Miss Barry, his sister, came on the death of his wife and took possession of the house, Susan being then just thirteen. She had but a bare sum wherewith to clothe and keep herself, and was therefore of little use in helping the household where money was concerned; and it was therefore with a sense of thankfulness that the Rector four years ago accepted the charge of Dominick Fitzgerald, an orphan, and the son of a stepbrother of his wife.