The two ladies were to arrive about tea time next day, and, as the hour drew on, a lively restlessness got hold of Harry. He could neither sit, nor stand, nor read, but after a paragraph of a page, the meaning of which slipped from his mind even as his eyes hurried over the lines, he would be off on an aimless excursion to the dining room, forget what he had gone about, and return with the same haste to his book. Then he would remember that he wanted the table to-night in the centre of the room, not pushed, as they had been having it, into the window; and there must be a place left for the Luck in the middle of the table. Again he would be off to the dining room; there was the table in the centre of the room, and in the centre of the table a place for the Luck, for he had given twenty repetitions of the order to Templeton, which was exactly twenty repetitions more than were necessary. Harry, in fact, was behaving exactly like the cock sparrow in mating time, strutting before its lady—an instinct in all young males. But there were not enough flowers; there must be more flowers and less silver. How could Dutch silver[Pg 155] be ornamental in the neighbourhood of that gorgeous centrepiece, and how, said his heart to him, could the Luck be ornamental, considering who should sit at his table?

He went back again to the hall, after giving these directions, where tea was laid. Mr. Francis was out on the lawn; he could see his yellow Panama hat like a large pale flower under the trees; the windows were all open, and the gentle hum of the warm afternoon came languidly in. Suddenly a fuller note began to overscore these noises in gradual crescendo, the crisp gravel grated underneath swift wheels, and next moment he was at the door. And, at sight of the girl, all his Marthalike cares, the Dutch silver, the position of the table, slipped from him. Here was the better part.

"Welcome!" he said; "and welcome and welcome!" and he held the girl\'s hand far longer than a stranger would; and it was not withdrawn. A little added colour shone in her cheeks, and her eyes met his, then fell before them. "So you have not stayed to keep Lord Oxted company," he said. "I can spare him pity.—How are you, Lady Oxted?"

"Did you think I should?" asked Evie.

"No; I felt quite certain you would not," said Harry, with the assurance which women love. "Do come in; tea is ready."

"And I am ready," said Evie.

"And this is the hall," continued Harry, as they entered, "where every one does everything.[Pg 156] Oh! there is a drawing-room: if you wish we will be grand and go to the drawing-room. I had it made ready; but let us stop here.—Will you pour out tea, Lady Oxted."

Lady Oxted took a rapid inventory of the tapestry and portraits.

"I rather like drinking tea in a cow shed," she remarked.

In a few moments Mr. Francis entered with his usual gay step, and in his hand he carried his large hat.

"How long since we met last, Lady Oxted!" he said. "And what a delight to see you here!"

"Miss Aylwin, Uncle Francis," said Harry, unceremoniously.

The old man turned quickly.

"Ah! my dear Miss Aylwin," he said—"my dear Miss Aylwin," and they shook hands.

Harry gave a little sigh of relief. Ever since his uncle\'s attack, a fortnight ago, he had felt in the back of his mind a little uneasiness about this meeting. It seemed he might have spared himself the pains. Nothing could have been simpler or more natural than Mr. Francis\'s manner; yet the warmth of his hand-shake, the form of words, more intimate than a man would use to a stranger, were admirably chosen—if choice were not a word too full of purpose for so spontaneous a greeting—to at once recognise and obliterate the past. The meeting was, as it were, a scene of reconciliation between two who had never set eyes on each other before, and between whom the[Pg 157] horror of their vicarious estrangement would never be mentioned or even be allowed to be present in the mind. And Mr. Francis\'s words seemed to Harry to meet the situation with peculiar felicity.

The old man seated himself near Lady Oxted.

"This is an occasion," he said, "and both Harry and I have been greatly occupied with his house-warming. But the weather—there was little warming there to be done; surely we have ordered delightful weather for you. Harry told me that Miss Aylwin wished for a warm day. Indeed, his choice does not seem to me, a poor northerner, a bad one; but Miss Aylwin has perhaps had too much Italian weather to care for our poor imitation."

"Lord Vail refused to promise," said Evie; "at least he did not promise anything about the weather. I was afraid he would forget."

"Ah! but I told my uncle," said Harry. "He saw about it: you must thank him."

Evie was sitting opposite the fireplace, and her eye had been on the picture of old Francis which hung above it. At these words of Harry\'s she turned to Mr. Francis with a smile, and her mouth half opened for speech. But something arrested the words, and she was silent; and Harry, who had been following every movement of hers, tracing it with the infallible minute intuition of a lover to its desiring thought, guessed that the curious resemblance between the two had struck with a force that for the moment took away[Pg 158] speech. But, before the pause was prolonged, she answered.

"I do thank you very much," she said. "And have you arranged another day like this for to-morrow?"

She looked, as she spoke, out of the open windows and into the glorious sunshine, and Harry rose.

"Shall we not go out?" he said. "Uncle Francis will think we do not appreciate his weather if we stop in."

Evie rose too.

"Yes, let us go out at once," she said. "But let me first put on another hat. I am not in London, and my present hat simply is London. O Lord Vail, I long to look at that picture again, but I won\'t; I will be very self-denying, for I am sure—I am sure it is the Luck in the corner of it."

She put up her hand so as to shield the picture from even an accidental glance.

"Will you show me my way?" she asked. "I will be down again in a minute."

Harry took her up the big staircase, lit by a skylight, and lying in many angles.

"Yes, you have guessed," he said. "It is the Luck: you will see the original to-night at dinner. Did anything else strike you in the picture? Oh, I saw it did."

"Yes, a curious false resemblance. I feel sure it is false, for I think that portrait represents not a very pleasant old gentleman. But your[Pg 159] uncle, Lord Vail—I never saw such a dear, kind face!"

Harry flushed with pleasure.

"So now you understand," he said, "what your coming here must mean to him. Ah! this is your maid, is she not? I will wait in the hall for you."

The two elder folk had already strolled out, when Harry returned to the hall, a privation which he supported with perfect equanimity, and in a few minutes he and his companion followed. As they crossed the lawn, Harry swept the points of the compass slowly with his stick.

"Flower garden, kitchen garden, woods, lake, farm, stables," he said.

Evie\'s eye brightened.

"Stables, please," she said. "I am of low horsey tastes, you must know, and I was afraid you were not going to mention them. We had the two most heavenly cobs I ever saw to take us from the station."

"Yes, Jack and Jill," said Harry. "But not cobs—angels. Did you drive them?"

"No, but I longed to. May I, when we go back on Monday?"

"Tuesday is their best day," said Harry; "except Wednesday."

They chattered their way to the stables, where the two angels were even then at their toilets.

"There is not much to show you," said Harry. "There are the cobs that brought you.—Good-evening, Jim."

[Pg 160]

The man who was grooming them looked up, touched his bare head, and without delay went on with the hissing toilet, as a groom should. Evie looked at him keenly, then back to her companion, and at the man again.

"Yes, they are beautiful," she said, and as they turned, "is Vail entirely full of doubles?" she asked.

Harry smiled, and followed her into the stables of the riding horses.

"Jim is more like me than that picture of old Francis is like my uncle," he said. "I really think I shall have to get rid of him. The likeness might be embarrassing."

"I wouldn\'t do that," said Evie. "Our Italian peasants say it is good luck to have a double about."

"Good luck for which?"

"For both. Really, I never saw such an extraordinary likeness."

They spent some quarter of an hour looking over the horses, and returned leisurely toward the house, passing it and going on to the lake. The sun was still not yet set, and the glory of the summer evening a thing to wonder at. Earth and sky seemed ready to burst with life and colour; it was as if a new world was imminent to be born, and from the great austere downs drew a breeze that was the breath of life, but dry, unbreathed. Evie appropriated it in open draughts, with head thrown back.

"Aunt Violet was quite right, Lord Vail,[Pg 161] when she said you should never come to London," she exclaimed. "How rude she was to you that night, and how little you minded! Even now, when I have been here only an hour, I can no longer imagine how one manages to breathe in that stuffy, shut-in air. Winter, too, winter must be delicious here, crisp and bracing."

"So it would seem this evening," said Harry, "but you must see it first under a genuine November day. A mist sometimes spreads slowly from the lake, so thick that even I could almost lose my way between it and the house. It does not rise high, and I have often looked from the windows of the second story into perfectly clear air, while if you went out at the front door you would be half drowned in it. Higher up the road again you will be completely above it, and I have seen it lying below as sharply defined as the lake itself, and if you walk down from that wood up there, it is like stepping deeper and deeper into water. A bad one will rise as high as the steps of those two buildings you see to the right of the house, like kiosks, standing on a knoll, under which the road winds in front of the trees."

"And the house is all surrounded like an island? What odd buildings! What are they?"

"One is a summerhouse; I couldn\'t now tell you which. We used to have tea in it sometimes, I remember, when I was quite little. The other is the ice house—a horrible place: it used to haunt me. I remember shrieking with terror once when my nurse took me in. It was almost completely[Pg 162] dark, and I can hear now the echo one\'s step made; and there was a great black chasm in the middle of the floor with steps leading down, as I thought, to the uttermost pit. Two chasms I think there were; one was a well. But the big one was that which terrified me, though I dare say it was only ten or twelve feet deep. Things dwindle so amazingly as one grows up! I wish I could see this lake, for instance, as I saw it when I was a child. It used to appear to me as large as the sea seems now; and as for the sluice, it might have been the Iron Gates of the Danube."

"I know: things do get smaller," said Evie, "but, after all, this lake and the sluice are not quite insignificant yet. What a splendid rush of water! And I dare say the ice-house chasm is still sufficient to kill any one who falls in. That, after all, is enough for practical purposes. But then, even if they grow smaller, how much more beautiful they become! When you were little, you never saw half the colour or half the shape you see now. The trees were green, the sky was blue, but they gave one very surface impressions to what they give one now."

"Oh, I rather believe in the trailing clouds of glory," said Harry.

"Then make an effort to disbelieve in them every day," said Evie. "Shades of the prison house begin to grow around the growing boy, do they? What prison house does the man mean, if you please? Why, the world, this beautiful,[Pg 163] delightful world. Indeed, we are very fortunate convicts! And Wordsworth called himself a lover of Nature!" she added, with deep scorn.

"Certainly the world has been growing more beautiful to me lately," said Harry.

"Of course it has. Please remind me that I have to cut my throat without delay if ever you hear me say that the world is growing less beautiful. But just imagine a person who loved Nature talking of the world as a prison house! Who was it said that Wordsworth only found in stones the sermons he had himself tucked under them, to prevent the wind blowing them away?"

"I don\'t know. It sounds like the remark of an unindolent reviewer."

Evie laughed.

"Fancy talking about reviewers on an evening like this!" she said. "Oh, there\'s a Canadian canoe. May we go in it?"

The far end of the lake was studded with little islands only a few yards in circumference for the most part, but, as Evie explained, large enough for the purpose. And then, like two children together, they played at red Indians and lay in wait for a swan, and attempted to stalk a moor hen with quite phenomenal ill success. No word of any tender kind was spoken between them; they but laughed over the nonsense of their own creating, but each felt as they landed that in the last hour their intimacy had shot up like the spike of the aloe flower. For when a man and a maid can win back to childhood again, and play like children[Pg 164] together, it is certain that no long road lies yet to traverse before they really meet.

Lady Oxted was doomed that night to a very considerable dose—a dose for an adult, in fact—of what she had alluded to as nursery rhymes, for the Luck seemed absolutely to fascinate the girl, and Harry, seeing how exclusively it claimed her eyes, more than once reconsidered the promise he had made her to have it to dinner the next evening as well. She would hardly consent to touch it, and Harry had positively to put it into her hands, so that she might read for herself its legend of the elements. They drank their coffee while still at table, and Evie\'s eye followed the jewel till Templeton had put it into its case. Then, as the last gleam vanished:

"I am like the Queen of Sheba," she said, "and there is no more spirit left in me. If you lose the Luck, Lord Vail, you may be quite sure that it is I who have stolen it; and when I am told that two men in plain clothes are waiting in the drawing-room, I shall know what they have come about. Now for some improving conversation about facts and actualities, for Aunt Violet\'s sake."

Sunday afternoon was very hot, and Lady Oxted, Evie, and Harry lounged it away under the shade of the trees on the lawn. Mr. Francis had not been seen since lunch time, but it was clear that he was busy with his favourite diversion, for brisk and mellow blowings on the flute came from the open window of his sitting room.[Pg 165] Harry had mentioned this taste of his to the others, and it had been received by Lady Oxted with a short and rather unkind laugh, which had been quite involuntary, and of which she was now slightly ashamed. But Evie had thought the thing pleasant and touching, rather than absurd, and had expressed a hope that he wo............