ad been slouching about
the place, almost driven mad by my thoughts, and when I saw you took me
for a servant my fancy was for letting the thing go on. If I had been a
rich man instead of a pauper I would have kept your half-sovereign."

"I should not have enjoyed that when I found out the truth," said Miss
Vanderpoel.

"No, I suppose you wouldn't. But I should not have cared."

He was looking at her straightly and summing her up as she had summed
him up. A man and young, he did not miss a line or a tint of her chin or
cheek, shoulder, or brow, or dense, lifted hair. He had already, even
in his guise of keeper, noticed one thing, which was that while at times
her eyes were the blue of steel, sometimes they melted to the colour of
bluebells under water. They had been of this last hue when she had stood
in the sunken garden, forgetting him and crying low:

"Oh, if it were mine! If it were mine!"

He did not like American women with millions, but while he would not
have said that he liked her, he did not wish her yet to move away. And
she, too, did not wish, just yet, to move away. There was something
dramatic and absorbing in the situation. She looked over the softly
stirring grass and saw the sunshine was deepening its gold and the
shadows were growing long. It was not a habit of hers to ask questions,
but she asked one.

"Did you not like America?" was what she said.

"Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like
myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a
fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and
disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back
to begin over again--on nothing--here!" And he waved his hand over the
park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the
late afternoon gold.

"To begin what again?" said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing,
seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like
this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it
they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.

"You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to
others. To begin to build up again, in one man's life, what has taken
centuries to grow--and fall into this."

"It would be a splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and as she said
it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen
had moved her. She had