took good care to put no rein upon herself in the expression of her primitive emotions. It was with Lacrima that Ralph Dangelis found himself on ground that was less secure, but in the genial aplomb of his all-embracing good-fellowships, it was only by degrees that he became conscious even of this. He found the place not only extraordinarily harmonious to his general temper, but extremely inspiring to his imaginative work. It only needed the securing of a few mechanical contrivances, a studio, for instance, with a north-light, to have made his sojourn at Nevilton one of the most prolific summers, in regard to his art, that he had experienced since his student days in Rome. He began vaguely to wish in the depths of his mind that it were possible for these good Romers to bestow upon him in perpetuity some pleasant airy chamber in their great house, so that he might not have to lose, for many summers to come, these agreeable and scandalous gossippings with the mother and these still more agreeable flirtations with the delicious daughter. This bold and fantastic idea was less a fabric of airy speculation than might have been supposed; for if the American was enchanted with his entertainers, his entertainers, at any rate the mother and the daughter, were extremely well pleased with him. The free sweep of his capacious sympathy, the absence in him of any punctilious gentility, the large and benignant atmosphere he diffused round him, and the mixture of cynical realism with considerate chivalry, were things so different from anything they had been accustomed to, that they both of them would willingly have offered him a suite of apartments in the house, if he could have accepted such an offer. Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at Nevilton at this especial moment. An abnormally retarded spring had led to the most delicious overlapping in the varied flora of the place. Though June had begun, there were still many flowers lingering in the shadier spots of the woods and ditches, which properly belonged not only to May, but to very early May. Certain, even, of April’s progeny had not completely faded from the late-flowering lanes.