Evelyn was still a child at heart, yet somewhat more than a child in mind.

In the majesty of-- "That hollow, sounding, and mysterious main,"-- in the silence broken but by the murmur of the billows, in the solitude relieved but by the boats of the early fishermen, she felt those deep and tranquillizing influences which belong to the Religion of Nature.
Unconsciously to herself, her sweet face grew more thoughtful, and her step more slow.

What a complex thing is education! How many circumstances, that have no connection with books and tutors, contribute to the rearing of the human mind! The earth and the sky and the ocean were among the teachers of Evelyn Cameron; and beneath her simplicity of thought was daily filled, from the turns of invisible spirits, the fountain of the poetry of feeling.
This was the hour when Evelyn most sensibly felt how little our real life is chronicled by external events,--how much we live a second and a higher life in our meditations and dreams.

Brought up, not more by precept than example, in the faith which unites creature and Creator, this was the hour in which thought itself had something of the holiness of prayer; and if (turning from dreams divine to earlier visions) this also was the hour in which the heart painted and peopled its own fairyland below, of the two ideal worlds that stretch beyond the inch of time on which we stand, Imagination is perhaps holier than Memory.
So now, as the day crept on, Evelyn returned in a more sober mood, and then she joined her mother and Mrs.Leslie at breakfast; and then the household cares--such as they were--devolved upon her, heiress though she was; and, that duty done, once more the straw hat and Sultan were in requisition; and opening a little gate at the back of the cottage, she took the path along the village churchyard that led to the house of the old curate.

The burial-ground itself was surrounded and shut in with a belt of trees.