surrounded with a sort of light, going on and on and on towards heaven, tea-time seeming so nice and mean and ordinary afterwards--or a book about a place in the north of England called Saltcoats, brine, and a vicarage and miners; the people in the book horrible, not lit up, talking about things and being gloomy and not always knowing what to do, never really sure about Heaven like the Fairchild family, black brackish book. The “Fairchild Family” was golden and gleaming. “The Anatomy of Melancholy” would not be golden like “The Fairchild Family” ... “the cart was now come alongside a wood which was exceedingly shady and beautiful”; “good manners and civility make everybody lovely”; but it would be round and real, not just chilly and moaning like “Saltcoats.” The title would be enough to keep one going at tea-time. An_at_--omy of _Mel_--ancholy, and the look of the close-printed pages and a sentence here and there. The Pernes would not believe she really wanted it there on the table. The girls would stare. When “The Story of Adèle” was finished she would have to find some other book; or borrow one. Nancie Wilkie, sitting at tea with her back to the closed piano facing the great bay of dark green-blinded window, reading “Nicholas Nickleby.” Just the very one of all the Dickens volumes that would be likely to come into her hands. Impossible to borrow it when Nancie had finished with it. Impossible to read a book with such a title. “David Copperfield” was all right; and “The Pickwick Papers.” “Little Dorritt”--“A Tale of Two Cities”--“The Old Curiosity Shop.” There was something suspicious about these, too. 2 Adèle--the story of Adèle. The book had hard, unpleasant covers with some thin cottony material--bright lobelia blue--strained over them and fraying out at the corners. Over the front of the cover were little garlands and festoons of faded gold, and in the centre framed by an oval band of brighter gold was the word Adèle, with little strong tendrils on the lettering. There was some secret charm about the book. The strong sunlight striking the window just above the coarse lace curtains that obscured its lower half, made the gilding shine and seem to move--a whole wild woodland. The coarse white toilet-cover on the chest of drawers, the three Bibles, the little cheap mahogany-framed looking-glass, Nancie Wilkie’s folding hand-glass, the ugly gas bracket sticking out above the mirror, her own bed in the corner with its coarse fringed coverlet, the two alien beds behind her in the room, and the repellant washstand in the far corner became friendly as the sun shone on the decorated cover of the blue and gold book.