The page-boy had brought from the library BY MERE AND WOLD
instead of BY MERE CHANCE, the book which every one denied having
read. The unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of
nature notes contributed by the author to the pages of some
Northern weekly, and when one had been prepared to plunge with
disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives
it was intensely irritating to read "the dainty yellow-hammers are
now with us and flaunt their jaundiced livery from every bush and
hillock." Besides, the thing was so obviously untrue; either
there must be hardly any bushes or hillocks in those parts or the
country must be fearfully overstocked with yellow-hammers. The
thing scarcely seemed worth telling such a lie about. And the
page-boy stood there, with his sleekly brushed and parted hair,
and his air of chaste and callous indifference to the desires and
passions of the world. Eleanor hated boys, and she would have
liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the
yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.
She turned at random to another paragraph. "Lie quietly concealed
in the fern and bramble in the gap by the old rowan tree, and you
may see, almost every evening during early summer, a pair of
lesser whitethroats creeping up and down the nettles and hedge-
growth that mask their nesting-place.
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