“One may forgive,” said Madam Tutterville sententiously. “Heaven knows I should be the last to deny that!”—this with the air of making a valuable concession to the decrees of Providence—“But there is another law: that chastisement shall follow misdoing. Was not David punished through Jonathan’s hair?” The parson’s waistcoat rippled over his gentle laughter. He was seated in one of the deep-winged library armchairs, and while he spoke his eyes roamed with ever renewed satisfaction over the appointments of the room—the silver bowl of roses, fresh filled, the artistic neatness of writing table, the high polish of oak and gilt leather. His fine appreciation for the fitness of things was tickled; his glance finally rested with complacency upon the figure of the young woman herself—the capable young woman who had wrought so many pleasing changes. And as he looked he smiled: Ellinor was the culminating point of agreeable contemplation amid exceedingly agreeable surroundings. She toned in so well with the scene! The sober golds and russets of the walls repeated their highest note in her burnished hair. Her outline, as she sat, exactly corresponded to the rector’s theory of what the female line of beauty should be. He liked the close, fine texture of her skin and the hues upon her cheeks, which fluctuated from geranium-white to glorious rose. The proud curl of her lip appealed to him; so did the sudden dimple. He liked the direct gaze of her honest blue eyes, and he was not unaware of the thickness and length of eyelashes that seemed to have little points of fire on their tips. That scholarly gentleman’s admiration was of so lofty, so philosophic a nature, that even his Sophia could have found no fault with it. But as he yielded himself to it, the conviction was ever more strongly borne in upon him that his wife, in her impetuosity, had reached to a juster conclusion concerning Ellinor than he in his own ripe wisdom. He had treated her repeated remark that “Here was just the wife for David, here the proper mistress of Bindon,” with his usual good-natured contempt. But to-day he saw Ellinor with new eyes. Yes, this was a gem worthy of Bindon setting. This would be a noble wife for any man; an ideal one for David—for fastidious David, to whom the old epicure felt especially drawn, although he recognised that one may make of fastidiousness a fine art and not push the cult to the point of David’s eccentricity. Here, then, was a woman fair enough to bring the Star-Dreamer, the soaring idealist back to earth; wholesomely human enough to keep him there in sanity and content, once Love had clipped his wing.