They went back to the tennis courts after tea, but there were not enough of them to make up two sets, the Breezy Bills having left on their bicycles, followed by a trail of Airedales. "Come and look at the rock-garden," said Caroline to Maurice Bradby.

The young man brightened visibly. He had sat silent during the conversation at the tea table, as he generally sat silent in company, being too diffident to put forward his views in a general conversation. But he had views of his own on many subjects, and those who took the trouble to elicit them often found them interesting.

Caroline was one of these. She was no older than he, but had seen so much more of the world and its inhabitants that her feeling towards him was almost maternal.

He was not like the young men whom she had met in such shoals in London ball-rooms and in country houses, not one of whom, however they might differ in character and tastes, but had done and known many of the things that she had. Bradby was the son of a clergyman, and had left his provincial Grammar-school for a stool in a provincial bank, to be released from it after four years of unhappy confinement for the country life after which his soul had always hankered. The country was a passion with him, and Caroline had penetrated some of his depths at an early stage, when the rest of the family were only in the state of finding him uncommonly heavy in hand, because his upbringing had not trained him to respond to the easy intimacy which they offered to all whom they thought worthy of it, and had offered to him on his introduction to them under Worthing's wing. Caroline, sweet and kind to all who seemed to need helping in the world, had taken more trouble about him than the rest, but they had all come to accept him by this time for what he was. It was no longer awkward to have him sitting silent while talk flowed high all about him; they knew him too well to be obliged to drag him into it out of politeness, or for one of them to detach herself to talk to him. And it was only in talk that he was backward. If there was anything to do he was a stand-by,—clever and capable and interested. All of them liked him very well, but only Caroline had come to be unaffected by his dissimilarity from type.

He was tall and loosely built, with large, strong hands, and, it must be confessed, with unusually large feet. His hair was not well brushed, and looked as if it could not be. His features were indeterminate, but he had large, dark eyes which somehow redeemed them. His clothes were unobtrusive, but whatever he wore he never looked well-dressed. Among the smart young men of the Graftons' large circle of friends, who came down to shoot at Abington or to spend week-ends there, and even those who were not smart but belonged obviously to the same class, he seemed always out of place. This was somewhat of an annoyance to Beatrix, who was apt to complain that there was no reason why he should so persistently take a back seat, considering that they had done all they could to make a friend of him. But it did not annoy Caroline. She had seen once or twice young men among their visitors who did not live and move wholly on the surface of things find something in common with him. He was her protÉgÉ. She did not even want to see him 'smartened up,' as Beatrix, commenting upon his unaccented appearance, had sometimes suggested as a process that would improve him.

The rock-garden, fashioned the previous year out of a disused stone quarry across a paddock from the garden, was full of interest, in this its second flowering season, and attracted visits at all hours of the day. Maurice Bradby had worked hard with hands and brains at its construction, and knew more about what was growing in it than any of its owners. He had had few opportunities of acquiring garden knowledge in the provincial town in which most of his life had been spent, but he sucked in and assimilated such knowledge without effort, and added to it by close observation, and to a lesser extent by study of his subject. All subjects that had to do with nature found this eager response in him, and Worthing, a countryman by birth and upbringing, had said more than once that he had never had a pupil so easy to teach.

Bradby found his voice the moment they were clear of the tennis lawn. "What did you mean about the system being wrong just now?" he asked.

She looked up at him with a smile. "I don't think I said it was wrong, did I?" she said. "I said that it wanted the right people to make it work."

He seemed to be considering this, and she said, half jestingly, "I know you think everything is right in the country."

"It's right for me," he said simply. "I suppose it's right for you, too, isn't it?"

"Yes; but then look how you and I are placed."

He considered this too. "We're not placed in the same way," he said. "I'm part of the machine, and I'm learning to be a still more important part of the machine."

"Well, am I not part of the machine too? If we were just here to enjoy ourselves, as some people do buy country houses just to enjoy themselves, I suppose that would mean standing apart from the machine. But we aren't like that, are we?"

He did not reply at once, and as they had now reached the rock-garden, and Caroline's next words were about the flowers that were showing their vivid spring colours in the amphitheatre all about them, the conversation was broken off for the time.

But it was resumed again a little later, as they stood here and there, or moved slowly up and down the rocky stairs or about the stone paths.

"You know, I think we did take it rather as a new toy when we first come down here," Caroline said. "We loved the country, and we wanted a country house of our very own. Of course we've all enjoyed it awfully in that way, but I don't think any of us thought we should live here so much as we have. We've hardly lived in London, all together, since. And we are always wanting to get back here when we do."

"Mr. Grafton doesn't take such an interest in the estate as Sir Alexander does in Wilborough?" he said.

She laughed. "Darling old Dad!" she said. "It is rather a bore to him. He works when he is in London, and likes to play down here, and leave the work to you and Uncle Jimmy. But he's a good Squire all the same, isn't he? He gives you everything you ask for."

"Oh, yes. There's never any trouble about money to run the show as it ought to be run. I only meant he didn't take much interest in details."

"I don't suppose people at the head of a big business generally do, do they? They leave the details to the people they can trust. Dad wouldn't take much interest in the details of his banking."

"Oh, well, I see what you mean. This isn't his real business as it is Sir Alexander's. Still, there's something I can't get quite right in my mind. It's all so—well, so happy, to me, that I don't like to think there's a flaw anywhere—in the system, I mean. Mr. Grafton pays for it, doesn't he? He makes his money somewhere else. He bought the estate, but it can't return him much on his capital—certainly not enough to live on in the way you do."

"No, but why should it? We get all the fun of it extra. I suppose you may say Dad pays for that. It returns enough to run itself, though. I suppose you and Uncle Jimmy see to that."

"Oh, yes. It keeps us going, too. And everything is run as it ought to be. All the farms are let, and everybody is contented,—or ought to be. Everybody is getting a living, anyhow, out of the land."

"I love to think of people getting a living out of the land."

His eyes shone as he turned his face quickly to her. "Do you feel like that about it, too?" he asked. "So do I. It fills me with pleasure. I like to think of everything that's growing on the land, and every little thing that's done to make it grow, and the men who do it all; and some of them get so wise, always living and working on it, that you would never learn all they know if you read about it till the end of your life."

"I talked to old Bull once while he was laying a fence," she said. "He was proud to let me see how cleverly he was doing it, and that it wasn't so easy as it looked. He has been hedging and ditching all his life, and he enjoys it as much as anything he could do."

"Yes, I know. That's the sort of work a man can enjoy, with his hands. You're helping nature, and if you learn the ways of nature she helps you. There's never any monotony in nature. She's alive."

"When you see people like that, you're apt to be ashamed of yourself for all the things you want to make you contented. Old Bull has brought up a large family on less than half of what I have for a dress allowance. His dear old wife,—I know her too—gets the most out of every penny that he gives her, and he has all he wants at home. There's no anxiety about life when you've been trained to do without things and not to want them."

"No, you get your satisfaction out of the things you have, and they are much bigger than the things you do without."

"They have enough to eat and drink, and good clothes to wear. They have their family interests, and their friends. They see people they know, and have known all their lives, more easily than people like us do. They hardly ever move out of their village, but the little changes of life from day to day and from week to week, with their work, and their times of leisure, are enough for them."

He smiled at her. "It's an idyllic picture," he said. "There are people who will tell you that you won't keep them on the land except by bringing the pleasures of the town to them."

She did not hesitate; her ideas seemed to be clearly set. "That's mostly the young people," she said. "I'm only thinking now of the older ones, who really belong to the land. Their interests are in it, and I think it brings them something as near contentment as it is possible to have."

"You feel a little like that about it yourself, don't you?" he asked half shyly.

She smiled. "I suppose we are generally thinking a little about ourselves when we are talking about other people," she said. "I know how different my life is from theirs—how much more I want to—to keep me quiet. But I know that the more simple I make it, and the more it depends upon what lies around me, the happier I am."

He looked at her almost with veneration. She was an unusually pretty girl, with an expression of sweetness and kindness which was more than her beauty. To him she seemed so far above all other girls whom he had ever seen as to be of a different flesh and spirit. Beatrix was even more beautiful than Caroline, and she was kind and sweet too, though with more contrariety in her. But to him she was common clay beside Caroline, whose lightest word he was inclined to receive as an oracle. Both of them seemed to him, in his self-respecting timidity, far above himself. He had had no contact with the life they represented before he had come to Abington, and thought himself quite unfitted to take part in it, with its ease and elaboration of wealth and unfamiliar custom marking it at every turn. To think of himself as anywhere on the same footing as these shining girls would have seemed to him hardly less presumptuous than to think of himself as on a level with a Royal Princess. But just as the goddesses of old time filled the hearts of mortal men with bliss by showing them what they shared with them, but never lost their godhead by so doing, so Caroline moved his wonder and admiration by letting him into some of the secret places of her nature, which was as fair as its outward form, but still remained high above him.

"It's what I feel," he said gently, "though I lived a dull life before I came here, and you lived a gay one. I've given up nothing that I wanted. I enjoy my life much more; but still it's a good deal simpler than it was."

"It comes of doing the work you like in the surroundings you like," she said sagely. "With a woman it isn't so much the work as all the little ways of spending her time. She doesn't as a rule, unless she's creative, or has to earn her own living, work by herself, or for herself. She is in touch with others all the time. I never thought of myself as having a place here, except the one I have always had at home. But I have, you know. I've made friends with a great many people. We all have. We know most of the people in the village, and all the children. I suppose I just thought of Abington, when we first came down, as a lovely house in which we could enjoy ourselves, by ourselves, or with the friends we asked to come here, and the people we should get to know in the houses round. I never thought of it as a place with a few hundred people living right round you. But now I know them, it's different. I have plenty of friends among them too, friends who tell me things about themselves, and like to hear what I have to tell them. I think I have made myself part of the machine, after all. But I like to think about it as a big family."

They were walking back to the tennis lawn by this time. "Yes, that's what Worthing meant by the human side," said Bradby. "I know he thinks a lot about that, and we have talked about it. It isn't giving them charity; they don't want that; or they ought not to want it. It's feeling that you're all the same flesh and blood. If there has been anything wrong with the system, that's what has kept it together all these years."

Richard Mansergh and Beatrix did not talk about the system when they presently betook themselves for a stroll in the evening sunlight, before he mounted his horse to ride home. He had, in truth, a little difficulty in persuading her to take it with him, for his admiration of her had by this time reached the point at which it demanded expression, and expression in its turn was apt to demand answers of a kind which she was not ready to give. But at this time she rather prided herself upon her total immunity from the softer passions, and gained some satisfaction in fencing with them when they were obtruded on her notice. It was only a question of whether or no she was in the mood to exercise her wits that made her accept or decline these contests, and she had only hung back a little because her late activities had rather tired her.

She was enough to turn the head of any man, with her sweet flower-like face, whose mischievous eyes only made it more bewitching. She was only nineteen, and her slender form had hardly yet filled out to womanhood, but showed delicious soft curves of neck and shoulder. She wore a short white skirt and a white silk blouse, all very workmanlike for her play, but most femininely becoming. A wide-brimmed hat, which she caught up from the seat beside her, slightly altered the note of her clothes. She seemed to the young man more desirable thus, walking by his side, than in the activities of the game, although he had admired her grace and skill too while she had been playing. Perhaps the hat was put on instinctively to soften the impressions of athleticism; but a wide hat brim also conceals eyes and mouth from one who is considerably taller, when it is to be desired that they shall be concealed.

Richard Mansergh was some years older than she—a Commander in His Majesty's Navy, and a good man at his job, a born lover of the sea, but just at present anxious to spend as much time away from it as rules and duties stretched to their utmost limit would allow. He was taller than most sailors, and rather good-looking or rather ugly according to whether regularity of feature or perfection of limb should appeal to the observer. In form he was something of an Adonis, and the shape of the head and the way it was set on his neck hardly prepared one for a face that was not that of an Adonis, though it showed strength and a cleanness that had its attraction too.

He was very deeply in love, more deeply in love than he had ever been in his life, or had ever thought to be with a very young girl, since his salad days were long since over. He was of an ardent temperament, and previous loves had burnt themselves out without ever coming to the point of a strong desire for matrimony. But this time it was coming to that, if he could win himself any response from this intoxicating, tormenting, elusive creature, whose image had imprinted itself so deeply on his inward vision that he walked the earth or sailed the seas with it ever before him. He was masterful in his ways, and his wooing, when once he had made up his mind, was direct. But he would never propose to her, if he wooed her for ten years, unless he gained some sign of love from her. He wanted the whole of her, for his very own. It was like heady wine to him to think of her with him always, in spirit if not in body. All he would have, all he would do, would be hers, but she must make it so first, and she must give him back all that was in her, all the endless treasures of her mind and her spirit, which thrilled him afresh every time he brought a new one to light. He had never felt like that about any woman before, and he exulted in the strength of his passion, and the new things about love that it was teaching him. They were all good things, and made the cleanest of his past loves seem like mere sensuality. It would be the true, deathless marriage, if he could win her.

Beatrix was far from suspecting on what a pedestal of adoration he had set her. It hardly showed in the way he treated her, which was masterful and encroaching. She knew she was being stormed, and rather enjoyed it, but she did not know how the weather would change, if she surrendered. Then there would be a deep enduring calm, and strength in which she could rest herself. If she surrendered! She was nowhere near it at present.

"I want you to tell me about that fellow you were in love with."

She turned a little pale at the shock, and stood still on the grassy path down which they were wandering towards the yew-enclosed lily pond. She was used to his abrupt attacks, and had nerved herself to meet one, as he had walked silent by her side. But she had not expected anything like this.

Her momentary pallor was succeeded by a deep blush, as she looked up at him with protesting eyes. He met her gaze, and adored her afresh because she did not look down.

"Really, I'm not going to talk to you about that," she said indignantly.

He went on, and after a moment's hesitation she went with him, though her inclination was to turn back. But she never ran away from anything.

"Why not?" he asked. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. I want to know how much you cared for him."

The shock once over, Beatrix was not sorry to have her lips opened for her. It is not often that a girl is given the opportunity of explaining that she did not care very much for a man to whom she has been engaged, and who has left her; at least, not to anybody to whom the statement will bring pleasure, and credence.

"Haven't you ever known what calf-love is?" she enquired, beginning by being very hard upon herself.

"Oh, yes, rather. All men do. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Love's a very beautiful thing, you know, and if you like beautiful things you're on the lookout for it from an early age. Sometimes it's the right sort of thing you get hold of, but as you don't know much when you're first attacked you generally don't."

Beatrix felt herself helped. "Well, I suppose girls have it, too," she said. "In books they are generally supposed to begin with a curate."

She felt suddenly rather like crying, she could not have told why; but it was because the love she had given to the man who had been sent away from her and had not come back again, had been a sacred thing, though now it was dead; and its uprooting had left a wound which had not yet become a scar. She was glad to sit down on one of the stone seats of the lily-pond garden, which by this time they had reached.

"You wouldn't do that sort of thing," he said. "I expect until that fellow made love to you, you'd laughed at it all."

This was quite true, and she felt herself lifted by his understanding. It was painful to have loved and to love no longer; but since she did love no longer it was more comforting to her self-respect to believe that her love had been of a lighter quality than she had thought it at the time.

She dropped the ugly idea of calf-love. She could do better than that, on consideration. "I should have been a Marquise you know," she said, "and a very rich and important one. Girls are apt to be bowled over by that sort of thing, you know."

"You wouldn't be, though," he said again with great directness.

This was quite true too. She was flattered, but was not prepared to drop this line entirely. And she believed every word she was saying. "I don't mean that I was on the lookout for a title, in that crude sort of way," she said. "I don't think I'm like that."

How entirely unlike it he thought her he found it difficult to refrain from saying in a way that might have startled her, touched as he was by the pathetically doubtful note in her speech.

"Of course you're not," he said. "I told you so. But I suppose everybody all round you was egging you on, and flattering you about it. You'd like to think you were pleasing people."

How understanding he was, in spite of the rough shocks his speeches sometimes brought with them! It really had been like that, at first.

"My darling old Daddy wasn't pleased at all," she said. "He hated it."

"Yes, I know he did. It's a great feather in his cap. Most fathers would have gone about purring. He was a good-looking fellow too, wasn't he? I never saw him myself, but my brother Geoffrey says he was."

This was a line she would rather have kept off of. "Yes, I suppose he was," she said judicially. "He was a lot older than me, and had seen a great deal of the world. Of course that flattered me. I don't think a younger man would have swept me off my feet as he did."

The Marquis de Lassigny had been thirty-six at the time of his quick wooing of Beatrix. Richard Mansergh was thirty-two, and had also seen a good deal of the world. This statement brought him pleasure.

"I see now," said Beatrix, speaking very calmly, "that I thought of him as possessing all sorts of qualities that weren't really his. Of course I thought I knew a great deal about men, as I had been out a whole season, and had seen so many of them. Now I see how little I really knew."

She was getting on very nicely, but his next words brought a check. "But you did love him," he said, uncompromisingly. "You wanted to give him everything that was in you."

How true that was she felt a pang in remembering. Whatever his love for her had been, hers had been for him the entire surrender of all she was or would be.

She was on her defence. "I told you I didn't know enough," she said. "But I had never loved anybody before—in that way. Of course I gave all the best that was in me."

He caught his breath. It wouldn't have been she if she hadn't done that. But what a treasure for a man to throw away! "He can't have been fit to black your boots," he said, "or he'd have waited for you for twenty years."

She felt the need of a lighter note. "I should have been old and ugly by that time," she said.

"You'd have been neither. But if you'd lost all your looks you'd have been just the same."

She was touched by the almost impersonal conviction in his speech, and comforted by his belief in her. But she was not yet ready. "It's very kind of you to say that," she said. "He didn't think so. And I'm very glad he didn't now. It took me a little time to get over it, but I have got over it. I don't want anything that I haven't got now. I love my family, and they love me, and we're all going to be happy together for a long time. Now, I think we'll go in."

He rose obediently and walked back to the house by her side. She had given him no opening such as he ardently longed for, no response that might bid him hope. But he could wait for that. It would come in time, if mortal man could do anything to induce it.

As for her, she was in a more emotional state than appeared on the surface. Such an experience as she had undergone—to love for the first time, and to have the love rejected—could scarcely help hardening a nature such as hers, yielding and trustful. But the hardening would not set in until the wound became a scar; and he had opened it again, and delayed the process.

It served him better than he knew that he had done so.