IT continued to be for the lady of Eastmead, as the years went on, a sustaining reflection that if in the matter of upholstery she yielded somewhat stiffly to the other house, so the other house was put out of all countenance by the mere breath of her garden. Tony could beat her indoors at every point, but when she took her stand on her lawn she could defy not only Bounds but Wilverley. Her stand, and still more her seat, in the summer days, was frequent there, as we easily gather from the fortified position in which we next encounter her. From May to October she was out, as she said, at grass, drawing from it most of the time a comfortable sense that on such ground as this her young friend’s love of new ness broke down. He might make his dinner-service as new as he liked; she triumphed precisely in the fact that her trees and her shrubs were old. He could hang nothing on his walls like her creepers and clusters; there was no velvet in his carpets like the velvet of her turf. She had everything, or almost everything she had space and time and the river. No one at Wilverley had the river as she had it; people might say of course there was little of it to have, but of whatever there was she was in intimate possession. It skirted her grounds and improved her property and amused her guests; she always held that her free access made up for being, as people said, on the wrong side of it. If she had not been on the wrong side she would not have had the little stone foot-bridge which was her special pride and the very making of her picture, and which she had heard compared she had an off-hand way of bringing it in to a similar feature, at Cambridge, of one of the celebrated “ backs.” The other side was the side of the other house, the side for the view the view as to which she entertained ihe merely qualified respect excited in us, after the first creative flush, by mysteries of our own making. Mrs. Beever herself formed the view and the other house was welcome to it, especially to those parts of it enjoyed through the rare gaps in an interposing leafy lane. Tony had a gate which he called his river-gate, but you didn’t so much as suspect the stream till you got well out of it. He had on his further quarter a closer contact with the town; but this was just what on both quarters she had with the country. Her approach to the town was by the “ long way ” and the big bridge, and by going on, as she liked to do, past the Doctor’s square red house. She hated stopping there, hated it as much as she liked his stopping at Eastmead: in the former case she seemed to consult him and in the latter to advise, which was the exercise of her wisdom that she decidedly preferred. Such degrees and dimensions, I hasten to add, had to do altogether with short relations and small things; but it was just the good lady’s reduced scale that held her little world together. So true is it that from strong compres sion the elements of drama spring and that there are conditions in which they seem to invite not so much the opera-glass as the microscope.

Never, perhaps, at any rate, had Mrs. Beever been more conscious of her advantages, or at least more surrounded with her conveniences, than on a beautiful afternoon of June on which we are again concerned with her. These blessings were partly embodied in the paraphernalia of tea, which had cropped up, with promptness and profusion, in a sheltered corner of the lawn and in the midst of which, waiting for custom, she might have been in charge of a refreshment-stall at a fair. Everything at the other house struck her as later and later, and she only regretted that, as the protest of her own tradition, she couldn’t move in the opposite direction without also moving from the hour. She waited for it now, at any rate, in the presence of a large red rug and. a large white tablecloth, as well as of sundry basket-chairs and of a hammock that swayed in the soft west wind; and she had meanwhile been occupied with a collection of parcels and paste board boxes that were heaped together on a bench. Of one of these parcels, enveloped in several layers of tissue-paper, she had just possessed herself, and, seated near her tea-table, was on the point of uncovering it. She became aware, at this instant, of being approached from behind; on which, looking over her shoulder and seeing Doctor Ramage, she straightway stayed her hands. These friends, in a long acquaintance, had dropped by the way so many preliminaries that absence, in their intercourse, was a mere parenthesis and conversation in general scarce began with a capital. But on this occasion the Doctor was floated to a seat not, as usual, on the bosom of the immediately previous.

“Guess whom I’ve just overtaken on your door step. The young man you befriended four years ago Mr. Vidal, Miss Armiger’s flame! ”

Mrs. Beever fell back in her surprise; it was rare for Mrs. Beever to fall back. “ He has turned up again?” Her eyes had already asked more than her friend could tell. “ For what in the world? ”

“For the pleasure of seeing you. He has evidently retained a very grateful sense of what you did for him.”

“I did nothing, my dear man I had to let it alone.”

“Tony’s condition of course I remember again required you. But you gave him a shelter,” said the Doctor, “ that wretched day and that night, and he felt (it was evidently much to him) that, in his rupture with his young woman, you had the right instinct of the matter and were somehow on his side.”

“I put him up for a few hours I saved him, in time, the embarrassment of finding himself in a house of death. But he took himself off. the next morning early bidding me good-bye only in a quiet little note.”

“A quiet little note which I remember you after wards showed me and which was a model of discretion and good taste. It seems to me,” the Doctor went on, “ that he doesn’t violate those virtues in considering that you’ve given him the right to reappear.”

“At the very time, and the only time, in so long a period that his young woman, as you call her, happens also to be again in the field! ”

“That’s a coincidence,” the Doctor replied, “ far too singular for Mr. Vidal to have had any forecast of it.”

“You didn’t then tell him? ”

“I told him nothing save that you were probably just where I find you, and that, as Manning is busy with her tea-things, I would come straight out for him and announce that he’s there.”

Mrs. Beever’s sense of complications evidently grew as she thought. “ By ‘ there ’ do you mean on the doorstep? ”

“Far from it. In the safest place in the world at least when you’re not in it.”

“In my own room?” Mrs. Beever asked.

“In that austere monument to Domestic Method which you’re sometimes pleased to call your boudoir. I took upon myself to show him into it and to close the door on him there. I reflected that you’d perhaps like to see him before any one else.”

Mrs. Beever looked at her visitor with apprecia tion. “ You dear, sharp thing! ”

“Unless, indeed,” the Doctor added, “ they have, in so many years, already met.”

“She told me only yesterday they haven’t.”

“I see. However, as I believe you consider that she never speaks the truth, that doesn’t particularly count.”

“I hold, on the contrary, that a lie counts double,” Mrs. Beever replied ............