rather moved.

"Have you been keeper here long?" she asked.

"No--only a few years. But I have known the place all my life."

"Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?"

"In his way--yes."

He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master. He was perhaps not
on particularly good terms with him. He led her away and volunteered no
further information. He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative. He did not
once refer to the circumstance of their having met before. It was
plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as
a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by accident
across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck. He was
stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt
that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.

But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one
she knew she should never forget. They wandered through moss walks and
alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues
of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of
budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons;
through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken
balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown
fountains splashing in lovely corners. Arches, overgrown with yet
unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty. Stillness
brooded over it all, and they met no one. They scarcely broke the
silence themselves. The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and
Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness
seemed to add a spell of enchantment. What could one say, to a stranger,
of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.

"But, oh!" she murmured once, standing still, with indrawn breath, "if
it were mine!--if it were mine!" And she said the thing forgetting that
her guide was a living creature and stood near.

Afterwards her memories of it all seemed to her like the memories of a
dream. The lack of speech between herself and the man who led her, his
often averted face, her own sense of the desertedness of each beauteous
spot she passed through, the mossy paths which gave back no sound of
footfalls as they walked, suggested, one and all, unreality. When
at last they passed through a door half hidden in an ivied wall, and
crossing a grassed bowling green, mounted a short flight of broken steps
which led them t