"It's a way worms have," said Hester.

"Oh, don't run a simile to death, Hester," said Mr. Gresley, impatiently. "If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning you would have seen I only used the word worm figuratively. I never meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to misunderstand me. Worms pay school-rates! Such folly is positively sickening, if it were not malicious."

Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at the incident.

As the church-bell stopped the swing-door opened, and Boulou hurried in, like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned. No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself to herself" for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a "grande passion" for Boulou.

The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the "shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.

"Oh, Regie, we always go there," said Mary, plaintively, who invariably chose the Pratts' park, with its rustic bridges and châlets, which Mr. Pratt, in a gracious moment, had "thrown open" to the Gresleys on Sundays, because, as he expressed it, "they must feel so cramped in their little garden."

But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the "shrubberies" they went. Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice near at hand.

As we grow older we realize that in the new gardens where life leads us we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in our old Garden of Eden, round the little gabled house where we were born. We were so thorough as children. We knew the underneath of every laurel-bush, the shape of its bunches of darkling branches, the green dust that our small restless bodies rubbed off from its under twigs. We see now as strangers those little hanging horse-tails of pink, which sad-faced elders call ribes; but once long ago, when the world was young, we knew them eye to eye, and the compact little black insects on them, and the quaint taste of them, and the clean, clean smell of them. Everything had a taste in those days, and was submitted to that test, just as until it had been licked the real color of any object of interest was not ascertained. There was a certain scarlet berry, very red without and very white within, which we were warned was deadly poison. How well, after a quarter of a century, we remember the bitter taste of it; how much better than many other forbidden fruits duly essayed in later years. We ate those scarlet berries and lived, though warned to the contrary.