CHAPTER X.

‘AND SPENDING SILVER HAD HE RIGHT YNOW.’

At ten o’clock Daphne was down at the boat-house again, ready for the aquatic excursion, looking as fresh and bright as if nothing had ever occurred to vex her. She wore a workmanlike attire of indigo serge—no gay fluttering scarlet ribbons this time. Her whole costume was studiously plain, from the sailor hat to the stout Cromwell shoe and dark blue stocking, the wash-leather glove and leathern belt with a broad steel buckle. Madoline’s flowing muslin skirts and flowery hat contrasted charmingly with her sister’s more masculine attire.

‘This looks like business,’ said Gerald, as Bink ran the boat into the water, and held her while the ladies stepped on board. ‘Now, Daphne, whichever of us gets tired first must forfeit a dozen pairs of gloves.’

‘I think it will be you, from the look of you,’ returned Daphne, as she rolled up her sleeves and took hold of an oar in an off-hand waterman-like manner. ‘When you are tired I’ll take the sculls.’

‘Well, you see I am likely to be in very bad form. It is four years since I rowed in the ‘Varsity race.’

‘What, you rowed in the great race? What affectation to talk about being in bad form. I should think a man could never forget training of that kind.’

‘He can never forget the theory, but he may feel the want of practice. However, I fancy I shall survive till we get to Goring Lane, and that you’ll win no gloves to-day. I suppose you never wear anything less than twelve buttons?’

‘Madoline gives me plenty of gloves, thank you,’ replied Daphne with dignity. ‘My glove-box is not supported by voluntary contributions.’

‘Daphne, do you know that for a young woman who is speedily to become my sister you are barely civil?’ said Gerald.

‘I beg your pardon, I am practising a sisterly manner. I never met with a brother and sister yet who were particularly civil to each other.’

They were rowing quietly up the stream, lowering their heads now and then to clear the drooping tresses of a willow. The verdant banks, the perpetual willows, were beautiful, but with a monotonous beauty. It was the ripe middle of the year, when all things are of one rich green—meadows and woods and hills—and in a country chiefly pastoral there must needs be a touch of sameness in the landscape. Here and there a spire showed above the trees, or a gray stone mansion stood boldly out upon the green hillside.

Daphne had so arranged cushions and wraps upon the principal seat as to conceal the mutilated name. Gerald rowed stroke, she sat in the bows, and Madoline reclined luxuriously in the stern with the Maltese terrier Fluff in her lap.

‘If we are lucky we shall be at the Abbey an hour and a half before your aunt and her ponies,’ said Gerald. ‘It was extremely obliging of her to volunteer the inestimable boon of her advice, but I fancy we should get on quite as well without her.’

‘It would have been unkind to let her think we didn’t want her,’ said Madoline deprecatingly.

‘That is so like you, Lina; you will go through life putting up with people you don’t care about, rather than wound their feelings,’ said Gerald carelessly.

‘Aunt Rhoda is my father’s only sister. I am bound to respect her.’

‘I’ve no doubt the Old Man of the Sea was a very estimable person in the abstract,’ said Gerald, ‘but Sindbad shunted him at the first opportunity. Don’t look so distressed, dearest. Aunt Rhoda shall patronise us, and dictate to us all our lives, if it please you. By-the-by, what has become of your devoted slave and ally, Turchill? I expected to find him on the premises when I arrived at South Hill.’

‘He went up to London last week with his mother, to make a round of the theatres and picture-galleries. They will be home in a few days, I daresay.’

‘I wonder he can exist out of Warwickshire. He is so thoroughly bucolic, so permeated by the flavour of his native soil.’

‘He is very kind and good and true-hearted,’ protested Daphne, flushing indignantly; ‘and he is your old friend and kinsman. I wonder you can speak so contemptuously of him, Mr. Goring.’

‘What, my vixenish little Pop—Daphne,’ cried Gerald, colouring at this slip of the tongue, ‘is it thus the cat jumps? I would not underrate Edgar for worlds. He is out and away the best fellow I know; but, however much you may admire him, little one, that his mind is essentially bucolic is a fact—and facts are stubborn things.’

‘You have no right to say that I admire him. I respect and esteem him, and I am not ashamed to own as much, though you may think it a reason for laughing at me,’ retorted Daphne, still angry. ‘He taught me to row this very boat. He used to get up every morning at a ridiculously early hour, in order to be at South Hill in time to give me a lesson before breakfast.’

‘A man might do twice as much for your _beaux yeux_, and yet deem it no self-sacrifice.’

‘Don’t,’ cried Daphne. ‘Didn’t I tell you ages ago that I detest you when you flatter me?’

Madoline looked up with momentary wonder at that expression ‘ages ago;’ but Daphne was so given to wild exaggerations and a school-girl latitude of phrase, that ‘ages ago’ might naturally mean yesterday.

‘Daphne dearest, what has put you out of temper?’ she asked gently. ‘I’m afraid you’re getting tired.’

‘If she give in before we get to Goring Lane I shall claim a dozen pairs of gloves.’

‘I am not the least little bit tired; I could row you to Naseby, if you liked,’ replied Daphne haughtily; whereupon the lovers began to talk of their own affairs, somewhat lazily, as suited the summer morning and the quiet landscape, where a light haze that yet lingered over the fields seemed the cool and misty forecast of a blazing afternoon.

Goring Lane was an accommodation road, leading down from the home farm to the meadows on the river bank, and here they found a light open carriage and a pair of strong country-made gray horses waiting for them.

Gerald had sent his valet over before breakfast to make all arrangements for their reception. The man was waiting beside the carriage, and to Daphne’s horror she beheld in him the grave gentleman in gray who had helped to convey provisions for the Fontainebleau picnic: but not a muscle of the valet’s face betrayed the fact that he had ever seen this young lady before.

At the end of the lane they came into a shady park-like avenue, and then to a gray stone gateway, pillared, mediæval, grandiose; on the summit of each granite pillar a griffin of the most correct heraldic make grasped a shield, and on the shield were quarterings that hinted at a palmer’s pilgrimage in the Holy Land, and a ragged staff that suggested kindred with the historic race of Dudley.

The lodge-keeper’s wife and her three children were standing by the open gate, ready to duck profusely in significance of delight in their lord’s return. The male bird as usual was absent from the nest. Nobody ever saw a man at an entrance lodge.

The avenue of limes was of but thirty years’ growth, but there was plenty of good old timber on the broad expanse of meadow-land which Mr. Goring had converted into a park. There was a broad blue lake in the distance, created by the late Mr. Goring, an island in the middle of it, also of his creation; while a fleet of rare and costly foreign aquatic birds of Mr. Goring’s importation were sailing calmly on the calm water. And yonder, in the green valley, with a wooded amphitheatre behind it, stood the Abbey, built strictly after the fashion of the fifteenth century, but every block of stone and every lattice obviously of yesterday.

‘It wouldn’t be half a bad place if it would only mellow down to a sober grayness, instead of being so uncomfortably white and dazzling,’ said Gerald as they drew near the house.

‘It is positively lovely,’ answered Madoline.

She was looking at the gardens, which thirty years of care and outlay had made about as perfect as gardens of the Italian style can be. They were not such old English gardens as Lord Bacon wrote about. There was nothing wild, no intricate shrubberies, no scope for the imagination, as there was at South Hill. All was planned and filled in with a Dutch neatness. The parterres were laid out in blocks, and in the centre of each rose a fountain from a polished marble basin. Statues by sculptors of note were placed here and there against a background of tall orange-trees, arbutus, or yew. Everything was on a large scale, which suited this palatial Italian manner. Such a garden might have fitly framed the palace of a Medici or a Borgia; nay, in such a garden might Horace have walked by the side of Mæcenas, or Virgil recited a portion of his Æneid to Augustus and Octavia. There was a dignity, a splendour, in these parterres which Daphne thought finer than anything she had seen even at Versailles, whither Madame Tolmache had escorted her English pupils on a certain summer holiday.

‘The rose-garden will please you better than this formal pleasaunce, I daresay,’ said Gerald. ‘It is on the other side of the house, and consists wholly of grass walks and rose-trees. My dear mother gave her whole mind to the cultivation and improvement of her gardens. I believe she was rather extravagant in this one matter—at least, I have heard my father say so. But I think the result justified her outlay.’

‘And yet you want to build more hot-houses on my account, Gerald. Surely arrangements that satisfied Lady Geraldine will be good enough for me,’ said Madoline.

‘Oh, one ought to go on improving. Besides, you are fonder of exotics than my mother was. And the rage for church decoration is getting stronger every day. You will have plenty of use for your hot-houses. And now we will go and take a sketchy survey of the house, before we interview the worthy MacCloskie. Has Miss Lawford’s gardener arrived?’ Gerald asked of the gentleman in gray, who had occupied the box-seat, and was again in attendance at the carriage-door, while a portly butler and a powdered footman, both of the true English pattern, waited in the Gothic porch.

‘Yes, sir; Mr. MacCloskie is in the housekeeper’s room.’

‘I hope they have given him luncheon.’

‘No, sir, thank you, sir. He would take nothing but a glass of claret and a cigar. He has taken a stroll round the gardens, sir, so as to be prepared to give an opinion.’

The house was deliciously cool, almost as if ice had been laid on in the pipes which were used in winter for hot water. The hall was as profoundly Gothic as that at Penshurst—it was difficult to believe that the reek of a log fire piled in the middle of the stone floor had never gone up through yonder rafters, that the rude vassals of a feudal lord had never squatted by the blaze, or slept on yonder ponderous oaken settles. Nothing was wanting that should have been there to tell of an ancient ancestry. Armour that had been battered and dented at Cressy or Bannockburn, or at any rate most skilfully manipulated at Birmingham, adorned the walls. Banners drooped from the rafters; heads of noble stags that had been shot in Arden’s primeval wood, spears and battle-axes that had been used in the Crusades, and collected in Wardour Street, gave variety to the artistic decoration of the walls, while tapestry of undoubted antiquity hung before the doorways.

These things had given pleasure to Mr. Giles-Goring, but to his son they were absolutely obnoxious. Yet the father had been so good a father, and had done such honest and useful work in the world before he began to amass this trumpery, that the son had not the heart to dislodge anything.

They went through room after room—all richly furnished, all strictly mediæval: old oak carving collected in the Low Countries; cabinets that reached from floor to ceiling; sideboards large enough to barricade a Parisian boulevard; all the legends of Holy Writ exemplified by the patient Fleming’s chisel; polished oaken floors; panelled walls. The only modern rooms were those at one end of the Abbey, which had been refurnished by Lady Geraldine during her widowhood, and here there was all the lightness and grace of modern upholstery of the highest order. Satinwood furniture and pale-tinted draperies; choice water-colours and choicer porcelain on the walls; books in every available nook.

‘How lovely!’ cried Daphne, who had not been impressed by the modern mediævalism of the other rooms. ‘This is where I should like to live.’

Lady Geraldine’s morning-room looked into the rose-garden. She had not been able to do away with the mullioned windows, but a little glass door—an anachronism, but vastly convenient—had been squeezed into a corner to give her easy access to her favourite garden.

Madoline looked at everything with tender regard. Lady Geraldine had been fond of her and kind to her, and had most heartily approved her son’s choice. Tears dimmed Lina’s sight as she looked at the familiar room, which seemed so empty without the gracious figure of its mistress.

‘I fancied you would like to occupy these rooms by-and-by, Lina,’ said Gerald.

‘I should like it of all things.’

‘And can you suggest any alterations—any improvements?’

‘Gerald, do you think that I would change a thing that your mother cared for? The rooms are lovely in themselves; but were they ever so old-fashioned or shabby, I should like them best as your mother left them.’

‘Lina, you are simply perfect!’ exclaimed Gerald tenderly. ‘You are just the one faultless woman I have ever met. Chaucer’s Grisel was not a diviner creature.’

‘I hope you are not going to try my sister as that horrid man in the story tried Grisel,’ cried Daphne, bristling with indignation. ‘I only wish I had lived in those days, and had the reversion of Count Walter, as a widower. I’d have made him repent his brutality.’

‘I have no doubt you would have proved skilful in the art of husband-government,’ said Gerald. ‘But you needn’t be alarmed. Much as I admire Grisel I shan’t try to emulate her husband. I could not leave my wife in agony, and walk away smiling at the cleverness of my practical joke. Well, Lina, then it is settled that in these rooms there is to be no alteration,’ he added, turning to Madoline, who had been taking up the volumes on a little ebony bookstand and looking at their titles.

‘Please make no alteration anywhere. Let the house be as your father and mother arranged it.’

‘My sweet conservative! And we are to keep all the old servants, I conclude. They are all of my father’s and mother’s choosing.’

‘Pray keep them all. If you could any way find room for MacCloskie, without offending your head gardener——’

‘MacCloskie shall be superintendent of your own special hot-houses, my darling. It will be an easy, remunerative place—good wages and plenty of perquisites.’

A grinding of wheels on the gravel, and a tremendous peal of the bell at the principal entrance proclaimed the advent of a visitor.

‘Aunt Rhoda, no doubt,’ said Gerald. ‘Let us be sober.’

They went back to the hall to greet the new arrival. It was Mrs. Ferrers’s youthful groom, a smart young gentleman of the tiger species, who had made that tremendous peal. Mrs. Ferrers’s roan ponies were scratching up the gravel; but Mrs. Ferrers was not alone; a gentleman had just dismounted from a fine upstanding bay, and that gentleman was Edgar Turchill.

‘So glad to see you here, Aunt Rhoda,’ cried Gerald. ‘Why, Turchill, they told me you were in London!’

‘Came home last night, rode over to South Hill this morning, overtook Mrs. Ferrers on the way, and——’

‘I asked him to come on with me and to join in our round of inspection,’ said Aunt Rhoda. ‘I hope I did not do very wrong.’

‘You did very right. I don’t think Turchill feels himself much of a stranger at the Abbey, even though it has been a very inhospitable place for the last year or so. And now before we go in for any more business let’s proceed to luncheon. Your boat has had a most invigorating effect on my appetite, Daphne. I’m simply famished.’

‘So you came in Daphne’s boat. She rows pretty well, doesn’t she?’ asked Edgar, with a glance of mingled pride and tenderness at his pupil.

‘She might win a cup to-morrow. You have reason to be proud of her.’

They all went into the refectory, where, under the lofty open timber roof, a small oval table looked like an island in a sea of Turkey carpet and polished oak flooring.

‘It would have served you right if we had had the long dinner-table,’ Gerald said to Daphne, as he passed her with Mrs. Ferrers on his arm.

‘I thought we were going to picnic in the park,’ said Madoline.

‘Daphne——Neither you nor Daphne seemed to care about it,’ replied Gerald.

‘This is a great deal more sensible,’ remarked Mrs. Ferrers.

‘Oh, I don’t know; it’s awfully jolly to eat one’s luncheon under the trees in such weather as this,’ said Edgar.

‘For Mr. Turchill’s particular gratification, we will have afternoon tea in the cloisters,’ said Gerald. ‘Blake,’ to the butler, ‘let there be tea at half-past four on the grass in the cloisters.’

Daphne could eat or drink very little, though Edgar, who sat next to her, was pressing in his offers of lobster mayonnaise, and cold chicken, cutlets, sole à la maître d’hôtel, Perigord pie. She was looking about her at the portraits on the walls.

Facing her hung Prescott Knight’s picture of the man who began his career by wheeling barrows, and who ended it by building mighty viaducts, levelling hills, filling valleys, making the crooked paths straight. It was a brave honest English face, plain, rugged even, the painter having in no wise flattered his sitter; but a countenance that was pleasanter to the eye than many a handsome face. A countenance that promised truth and honour, manliness and warm feelings in its possessor.

Daphne looked from the portrait on the wall to the present master of the Abbey. No; there was not one point of resemblance between Gerald Goring and his father.

Then she looked at another portrait hanging in the place of honour above the wide Gothic mantelpiece. Lady Geraldine, by Buckner: the picture of an elegant high-bred woman of between thirty and forty, dressed in amber satin and black lace, one bare arm lifted to pluck a rose from a lattice, the other hand resting on a marble balustrade, across which an Indian shawl had been flung carelessly. Face and figure were both perfect after their kind—figure tall and willowy, a swan’s neck, a proud and pensive countenance, with eyes of the same doubtful colour as Gerald’s, the same dreamy look in them. Then Daphne turned her gaze to the other end of the room, where hung the famous Sir Peter Lely, a replica of the well-known picture in Hampton Court, for which replica Mr. Giles-Goring had paid a preposterous price to a poor and proud member of his wife’s family, who was lucky enough to possess it. Strange that a singleminded, honest-hearted man like John Giles-Goring should have been proud of his son’s descent from a king’s mistress, and should have hung the portrait of Felicia, Countess of Heronville, above the desk at which he read family prayers to his assembled household. Yes; Lady Heronville’s eyes were like Gerald’s, dreamily beautiful.

Everybody at the table had plenty to say, except Daphne. She was absorbed by her contemplation of the pictures. Edgar was concerned at her want of appetite. He tried to entertain her by telling her of the plays and pictures he had seen.

‘Your father ought to take you to town before the season is over. There is so much to see,’ he said; ‘and though I am told that all the West End tradespeople are complaining, it seems to me that London was never so full as this year. Hyde Park in the morning and afternoon is something wonderful.’

‘I should like to go to the opera,’ said Daphne rather listlessly. ‘Madame Tolmache took us to hear “Faust” one evening. She said that an occasional visit to the opera was the highest form of cultivation for the youthful mind. I believe she had a box given her by the music-master, and that she turned it to her own advantage that way—charging it in her bills, don’t you know. I shall never forget that evening. It was at the end of August, and Paris was wrapped in a white mist, and the air had a breathless, suffocating feeling, and the streets smelt of over-ripe peaches. But when we got out of the jolting fly that took us from the station to the theatre, and went to a box that seemed in the clouds, we had to go up so many stairs to reach it, and the music began, and the curtain went up, it was like being in a new world. I felt as if I were holding my breath all the time. Even Martha Dibb—that stupid, good-natured girl I told you about—seemed spell-bound, and sat with her mouth open, gasping like a fish. Nilsson was Marguerite, and Faure was Mephistopheles. I shall remember them to the end of my life.’

‘You’ll hear them again often, I hope. Nilsson was singing the other night, when I took my mother to hear Wagner’s great opera. The music is quite the rage, I believe; but I don’t like it as well as “Don Giovanni.”’

Luncheon was over by this time—a formal ceremonious luncheon, such as Daphne detested. It was her punishment for having been uncivil last night when the picnic idea was mooted. And now they all repaired to the gardens, and perambulated the parterre, and criticised the statues: Leda with her swan, Venus with an infant Cupid, Hebe offering her cup, Ganymede on his eagle—all the most familiar personages in Lemprière. The fountains were sending up their rainbow spray in the blazing afternoon sun. The geraniums, and calceolarias, and pansies, and petunias, and all the tribe of begonias, and house-leeks, newly bedded out, seemed to quiver in the fierce bright light.

‘For pity’s sake let us get out of this burning flowery furnace,’ cried Gerald. ‘Let’s go to the rose-garden; it’s on the shady side of the house, and within reach of my mother’s favourite tulip-trees.’

The rose-garden was a blessed refuge after that exposed parterre facing due south. Here there was velvet turf on which to walk, and here were trellised screens and arches wreathed with the yellow clusters of the Celine Forestier, and the Devoniensis. Mrs. Ferrers was a person who always discoursed of flowers by their botanical or fashionable names. She did not call a rose a rose, but went into raptures over a Marguerite de St. Armand, a Garnet Wolseley, a Gloire de Vitry, or an Etienne Levet, as the case might be.

Here, smoking his cigar, which he politely suppressed at their approach, they discovered Mr. MacCloskie, the hard-faced, sandy-haired Scottish gardener.

‘You have been taking a look at my grounds, I hear, MacCloskie,’ Mr. Goring said pleasantly.

‘Yes, sir; I’ve looked about me a bit. I think I’ve seen pretty well everything.’

‘And the hot-houses leave room for improvement, I suppose?’

‘Well, sir, I’m not wishing to say anything disrespectful to your architect,’ began MacCloskie, with that deliberation which gave all his speeches an air of superior wisdom, ‘but if he had tried his hardest to spend the maximum of money in attaining the minimum of space and accommodation—to say nothing of his ventilation and his heating apparatus, which are just abominable—he couldn’t have succeeded better than he has—unconsciously.’

‘Dear me, Mr. MacCloskie, that’s a bad account. And yet the gardeners here have managed to rub on very decently for a quarter of a century, with no better accommodation than you have seen to-day.’

‘Ay, sir, that’s where it is. They just roobed on, poor fellows. And I can only say that it’s very creditable to them to do as well as they have done, and if they’re about a quarter of a century behind the times nobody can blame them.’

‘Then we must build new houses—that’s inevitable, I conclude.’

‘Yes, sir, if you want to grow exotics.’

‘Yet I used to see a good deal of stephanotis about the rooms in my father’s time.’

‘Ay, there’s a fine plant growing in a bit of a glass—shed,’ said Mr. MacCloskie with ineffable contempt. ‘Necessity’s the mother of invention, Mr. Goring. Your gardeners have done just wonders. But with all deference to you, sir, that kind of thing wouldn’t suit me. And if Miss Lawford has any idea of my coming here by-and-by——’ with a respectful glance at his mistress, as he stood at ease, contemplating the spotless lining of his top-hat.

‘Miss Lawford would like you to continue in her service when she is Mrs. Goring. Perhaps you will be good enough to give me an exact specification of the space you would require, and the form of house you would suggest. I wish Miss Lawford to be in no way a loser when she exchanges South Hill for Goring Abbey.’

‘Thank you, sir, you are very good, sir,’ murmured the Scotchman, as if it were for his gratification the houses were to be built. ‘This is a very fine place, sir; it would be a pity if it were to be behind the times in any particular.’

The head gardener bowed and withdrew, everyone—even Aunt Rhoda—breathing more freely when he had vanished.

‘Isn’t he too utterly horrid?’ asked Daphne. ‘If there is a being I detest in this world it is he. Were I in Lina’s place I should take advantage of my marriage to get rid of him; but she will just go down to her grave domineered over by that man,’ concluded Daphne, mimicking MacCloskie’s northern tongue.

‘He is not the most agreeable person in the world,’ said Lina; ‘but he is thoroughly conscientious.’

‘Did you ever know a disagreeable person who did not set up for being a paragon of honesty?’ exclaimed Daphne contemptuously.

They roamed about the rose-garden, which was a lovely place to loiter in upon a summer day, and lingered under the tulip-trees, where there were rustic chairs and a rustic table, and every incentive to idleness. Beyond the tulip-trees there was a shrubbery on the slope of the hill, a shrubbery which sheltered the rose-garden from bleak winds, and made it a thoroughly secluded spot. While the rest of the party sat talking under the big broad-leaved trees, Daphne shot off to explore the shrubbery. The first thing that attracted her attention was a large wire cage among the laurels.

‘Is that an aviary?’ she asked.

‘No,’ answered Gerald, rising and going over to her. ‘These are my father’s antecedents.’

He pulled away the laurel branches which had spread themselves in front of the cage, and Daphne saw that it contained only a shabby old barrow, a pickaxe, and shovel.

‘Those were the stock-in-trade with which my father began his career,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe he had even the traditional half-crown. I’ve no doubt if he had possessed such a coin his mates would have made him spend it on beer. He began life, a barefooted, ignorant lad, upon a railroad in the north of England; and before his fortieth birthday he was one of the greatest contractors and one of the best-informed men of his time; but he never mastered the right use of the aspirate, and he never could bring himself to wear gloves. It was his fancy to keep those old tools of his, and to take his visitors to look at them, after they had gone the round of house and gardens.’

‘I hope you are proud of him,’ said Daphne, with a bright penetrating glance which seemed to pierce Mr. Goring’s soul. ‘I should hate you if I thought that, even for one moment in your life, you could feel ashamed of such a father.’

‘Then I’m afraid I must endure your hate,’ said Gerald. ‘No; I have never felt ashamed of my father: he was the dearest, kindest, most unselfish, most indulgent father that ever spoiled an unworthy son. But I have occasionally felt ashamed of that barrow, when it has been exhibited and explained to a new acquaintance, and I have seen that the now acquaintance thought the whole thing—the mock mediæval abbey, and the barrow, and my dear simple-hearted dad—one stupendous joke.’

‘I should be more ashamed of Felicia, Countess of Heronville, than of that barrow, if I were you,’ exclaimed Daphne, flushed and indignant.

‘You little radical! Mistress Felicia was by no means an exemplary person, but she was one of the loveliest women at Charles’s court, where lovely women congregated by common consent, while all the ugly ones buried themselves at their husbands’ country seats, and thought that some fiery comet must be swooping down upon the world because of wickedness in high places. Don’t be too hard upon poor Lady Heronville. She died in the zenith of her charms, while quite a young woman.’

‘Do you think she ought to be pitied for that?’ demanded Daphne. ‘Why, it was the brightest fate Heaven could give her. The just punishment for her evil ways would have been a long loveless old age, and to see her beauty fade day by day, and to know that the world she loved despised and forgot her.

“Whom the gods love die young, was said of old; And many deaths do they escape by this.”’

‘Where did you find those lines, little one?’

‘In a book we used to read aloud at Madame Tolmache’s, “Gems from Byron.”’

‘Oh, I see! Mere chippings, diamond dust. I was afraid you’d been at the Koh-i-noor itself.’

‘Are we to have some tea, Gerald?’ asked Madoline, crossing to them and looking at her watch as she came. ‘It is half-past four, and we must be going home soon.’

‘To the cloisters, ladies and gentlemen, to all that there is of the most mediæval in the Abbey.’

They passed under a Gothic archway and found themselves on a square green lawn, in the midst of which was another fountain in a genuine old marble basin, a Roman relic dug up thirty years ago in the peninsula of Portland. A cloistered walk surrounded this grass-plot. A striped awning had been put up beside the fountain, and under this the tea-table was spread.

‘Now, Lina, let us see if you can manage that ponderous tea-kettle,’ said Gerald.

‘It is the handsomest I ever saw,’ sleepily remarked Mrs. Ferrers, who had found the afternoon somewhat dreary, since nobody had seemed to want her advice about anything. ‘But I must confess that I prefer the Rector’s George the Second silver, and old Swansea cups and saucers, to the highest exemplars of modern art.’