u, I think, if you want
to come. She has scarcely seen an English person in the last
three years."

And as when a gleam searches out some blurred corner of a landscape,
there returned upon him his visit to the pair in their country home. He
recalled the small eighteenth-century house, the "chateau" of the
village, built on the French model, with its high _mansarde_ roof; the
shabby stateliness of its architecture matching plaintively with the
field of beet-root that grew up to its very walls; around it the flat,
rich fields, with their thin lines of poplars; the slow, canalized
streams; the unlovely farms and cottages; the mire of the lanes; and,
shrouding all, a hot autumn mist sweeping slowly through the damp
meadows and blotting all cheerfulness from the sun. And in the midst of
this pale landscape, so full of ragged edges to an English eye, the
English couple, with their books, their child, and a pair of
Flemish servants.

It had been evident to him at once that their circumstances were those
of poverty. Lady Rose's small fortune, indeed, had been already mostly
spent on "causes" of many kinds, in many countries. She and Dalrymple
were almost vegetarians, and wine never entered the house save for the
servants, who seemed to regard their employers with a real but
half-contemptuous affection. He remembered the scanty, ill-cooked
luncheon; the difficulty in providing a few extra knives and forks; the
wrangling with the old _bonne_-housekeeper, which was necessary before
_serviettes_ could be produced.

And afterwards the library, with its deal shelves from floor to ceiling
put up by Dalrymple himself, its bare, polished floor, Dalrymple's table
and chair on one side of the open hearth, Lady Rose's on the other; on
his table the sheets of verse translation from AEschylus and Euripides,
which represented his favorite hobby; on hers the socialist and
economical books they both studied and the English or French poets they
both loved. The walls, hung with the faded damask of a past generation,
were decorated with a strange crop of pictures pinned carelessly into
the silk--photographs or newspaper portraits of modern men and women
representing all possible revolt against authority, political,
religious, even scientific, the Everlasting No of an untiring and
ubiquitous dissent.

Finally, in the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom
Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black
hai