for this opportunity to show the ladies what he thought
of them. She felt that she herself had, during her doleful
month's leave from Bleet, where she was governess,
rather taken her place in the same snubbed order; but
it was presently, none the less, with a better little hope
of coming in for some remembrance, some relic, that
she went up to look at the things he had spoken of, the
identity of which, as a confused cluster of bright objects
on a table in the darkened room, shimmered at her as
soon as she had opened the door.
They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment,
before touching them, she knew them as things of
the theatre, as very much too fine to have been with
any verisimilitude things of the vicarage. They were
too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had
no jewels to speak of, and these were coronets and
girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel
and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if after the
first queer shock of them she found herself taking them
up it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her,
of a far-off faded story. An honest widowed cleric with
a small son and a large sense of Shakespeare had,
on a brave latitude of habit as well as of taste--since
it implied his having in very fact dropped deep into the
"pit"--conceived for an obscure actress several years
older than himself an admiration of which the prompt
offer of his reverend name and hortatory hand was the
sufficiently candid sign. The response had perhaps in
3
HYLAND
