"Playing with shells upon the shores of time.""I wonder why Heaven sent us into this world to face the mortifications we have to endure?""Do not say this, Greville, dearest; it is not for us to judge; we have but to suffer and endure, and be thankful for life, for health, and that we are not worse off than we are.""Thankful for life!" exclaimed the man, bitterly. "Why should I be thankful for a life of poverty, obscurity, and trouble?""Trouble is sent, as the preacher tells us, to make us better and draw us closer to God. It is 'not my will, but Thine be done'; so we ought not to question the mystery of life; and then, husband dear, we have our little boy!"As she said this, something of a soft smile replaced the angry and far-away expression that filled her husband's dark eyes.Greville Hampton and his wife Mary-her hands busy with work-were seated in the ivy-clad porch of their little cottage on a bright evening in summer. Before them, at the end of the vista down the dell in which it stood, lay the waters of the English Channel glittering in sunlight, as it rolled away from Rockham Bay to craggy Hartland Point, a sheer precipice 300 feet in height. If humble and small in accommodation, the cottage of Finglecombe was pretty externally, with its wealth of creeping plants, and kept scrupulously neat and clean within, though destitute of every luxury.Before the cottage lay the pretty garden which Greville Hampton tended with his own hands, and where Mary reared and twined her flowers. There were the ripening strawberries, their fresh green leaves lying lightly on beds of yellow straw, the late asparagus and wonderful cucumbers under glass-shades, mellow-flavoured peas in borders, and wonderful nectarines climbing up the wall. Behind the cottage, on the south, lay Finglecombe, (in old Devonian) "The dell with the hazel boundary," and a lovely dell it was, bordered by gentle slopes, covered with those "apple bowers," for which the district is so famous, in all their luxuriance and greenery. Yet, all this brought no pleasure to the eye or mind of Greville Hampton, a moody and discontented man, one on whom the world and society had smiled in other days, and thus he was ever comparing the present with the irrecoverable past.