r his sister; but it was quite a new sensation to him to
discuss the colours of gloves and ribbons, now that the trifles he chose
were to give pleasure to Marian Nowell. He knew every tint that
harmonised or contrasted best with that clear olive complexion--the
brilliant blue that gave new brightness to the sparkling grey eyes, the
pink that cast warm lights upon the firmly-moulded throat and chin--and
he found a childish delight in these trivialities. There was one ribbon
he selected for her at this time which he had strange reason to remember
in the days to come--a narrow blue ribbon, with tiny pink rosebuds upon
it, a daring mixture of the two colours.

He had the letter in the breast-pocket of his coat when he met John
Saltram at the station, and entertained that gentleman with certain
passages from it as they sped down to Maidenhead. To which passages Mr.
Saltram listened kindly, with a very vague notion of the writer.

"I am afraid she is rather a namby-pamby person," he thought, "with
nothing but her beauty to recommend her. That wonderful gift of beauty
has such power to bewitch the most sensible man upon occasion."

They chartered a fly at Maidenhead, and drove about a mile and a half
along a pleasant road before they came to the gates of Rivercombe--a low
straggling house with verandahs, over which trailed a wealth of flowering
creepers, and innumerable windows opening to the ground. The gardens were
perfection, not gardens of yesterday, with only the prim splendours of
modern horticulture to recommend them, but spreading lawns, on which the
deep springy turf had been growing a hundred years--lawns made delicious
in summer time by the cool umbrage of old forest-trees; fertile
rose-gardens screened from the biting of adverse winds by tall hedges of
holly and yew, the angles whereof were embellished by vases and peacocks
quaintly cut in the style of a bygone age; and for chief glory of all,
the bright blue river, which made the principal boundary of the place,
washing the edge of the wide sloping lawn, and making perpetual music on
a summer day with its joyous ripple.

There was a good deal of company already scattered about the lawn when
John Saltram and his friend were ushered into the pretty drawing-room.
The cheerful sound of croquet-balls came from a level stretch of grass
visible from the windows, and quite a little fleet of boats were jostling
one another at the landing by the Swiss boat-house.

Mrs.