... 'a Shepherdess, and fair was she.
He found she dwelt in Stratford, E.,
Which ain't exactly Arcadee.'
I
The radiant stillness of early summer morning lay over the gardens of Monk's Eype; and though the wide stone-flagged terrace was in shadow, the newly-risen sun rioted gloriously beyond, flecking with pink and silver the sheets of sand which spread their glistening spaces from the shore to the sea.
Cecily Wake, already up and dressed, sitting writing by her open window, felt exquisitely content. The pungent scent thrown out by the geranium bushes which rose from the curiously twisted vases set at intervals along the marble balustrade floated up to where she sat, giving a delicate keenness to the warm sea-wind. She longed to go out of doors and make her way down to the little strip of beach which she knew lay below the terraces and gardens; but the plain gold watch which had been her father's, and a treasured possession of her own since she had left the convent school, told her that it was only a quarter to six.
Alone the birds, the butterflies, and herself seemed to be awake, in this enchanting and enchanted place, and she put the longing from her. Now and again, as she looked up from the two account-books lying open before her on the old-fashioned, rather rickety little table set at right angles to the window, and saw before and below her the splendid views of land and sea, came joyous anticipations of pleasant days to be spent in the company of Mrs. Robinson. To her fellow-guests—to Downing, to Wantley—she gave no thought at all. Winfrith alone was a possible rival. She sighed a little as she remembered that Penelope had seen him yesterday, and would doubtless see him to-morrow.
The girl was well aware—for only the vain and the obtuse are not always well aware of such things—that David Winfrith had no liking for her; more, that he regarded her affection for Mrs. Robinson as slightly absurd; worst of all, that he viewed with suspicion and disapproval her connection with the Melancthon Settlement and its affairs.
Some folk are born to charity—such was Cecily Wake; and some, in these modern days at any rate, have charity thrust upon them—such, in the matter of the Melancthon Settlement, was David Winfrith. Problems affected him far more than persons; and though the apparently insoluble problems of London poverty, London overcrowding, and London thriftlessness, had become to him matters full of poignant concern, he gave scarcely a thought to the individuals composing that mass of human beings whose claims upon society he recognized in theory. What thought he did give was extremely distasteful to him, perhaps because he regarded those who now provided these problems as irrevocably condemned and past present help.
Winfrith had never cared to join in the actual daily effort made by the small group of educated, refined people, who were the precursors of the many now trying to grapple with a state of things which the thinkers of that time were just beginning to realize. Still, his hard good sense had been of the utmost use to the Settlement, or rather to Mrs. Robinson, during the years which immediately followed her husband's death.