r things.

"She's a perfect dear, isn't she--a dear. So you are riding her then?
Well, you'll find her easy to tie, she stands well. There's nothing
she can spoil, that's the charm of such an old, tumble-down place."

As Bulstrode followed after the trailing dress just touching the gravel
with a rustling sound, he had the feeling of being suddenly,
willy-nilly, taken and put into the heart of a story book. He smiled.
"Well, I've done the first chapter and now I've got to go on in the
book, I suppose, whether I want to be here or not, to the end."

"I thought I was making a voyage of discovery," he told her as they sat
in the low room before a fire and before her table and tea cups. "I
fancied I was the only person within miles round. I expect no one has
a right to be so bold, but I really didn't dream the place was lived
in, as, of course, you know."

"Drink your tea," she bade, "and eat your toast before I make you tell
me if you have come to see me as a messenger."

"And if I have?"

It was delicious tea, and the American of her had somehow found cream
for it, which, un-English luxury, the American in him fully
appreciated. The liquid in the blue-and-white cups was pale as saffron
and the toast was a feather.

"At five o'clock there's nothing like it in the world," he breathed.
"I didn't hope for this to-day. I had recklessly thrown five o'clock
over, for I'm alone at the castle." He drank his tea, finished, and
with a sigh. Then he said: "I can actually venture to ask you for
another cup, for I am nobody's messenger or envoy, my dear, nobody's.
I'm just an indiscreet, humdrum individual who has been too charmingly
rewarded for an intrusion. You saw my surprise, didn't you? And I'm
not very clever at putting on things."

The Duchess tacitly accepted, it is to be supposed, for she made him a
second cup of tea, slowly.

"You don't know that I've been thinking about you all day," he said,
"and I can frankly say that I've been making a very different picture
of you indeed."

She took no notice whatsoever of his personality.

"You are in England, then," she said rather formally. "I never think
of my own country people as being here. I always think of Americans as
being in the States, men above all, for they fit so badly in the
English atmosphere, don't they? It's always incongruous to me to hear
their "r's" and "a's" rattling about in this soft language. It's
horrid of me to speak so. You, of