, Victoria Tatham was on the watch for this something;
and not without jealousy and a critical mind. She had been taken by
surprise; and she resented it.

Harry was very long in coming back!--in order she supposed to give her
time to make acquaintance.

But at last she had them at the tea-table, and Mrs. Penfold's adjectives
were a little quenched. Each side considered the other. Lady Tatham's
dress, her old hat, and country shoes attracted Lydia, no less than the
boyish, open-air look, which still survived through all the signs of a
complex life and a cosmopolitan experience. Mrs. Penfold, on her part,
thought the old hat, and the square-toed shoes "unsuitable." In her young
days great ladies "dressed" in the afternoons.

"Do you like your cottage?" Lady Tatham inquired.

Mrs. Penfold replied that nothing could be more to their taste--except
for the motors and the dust.

"Ah! that's my fault," said a voice behind her. "All motorists are
brutes. I say, it was jolly of you to come!"

So saying, Tatham found a place between his mother and Mrs. Penfold,
looking across at Lydia. Youth, happiness, manly strength came in with
him. He had no features to speak of--round cheeks, a mouth generally
slightly open, and given to smiling, a clear brow, a red and white
complexion, a babyish chin, thick fair hair, and a countenance neither
reserved nor foolishly indiscreet. Tatham's physical eminence--and it was
undisputed--lay not in his plain, good-tempered face, but in the young
perfection of his athlete's form. Among spectacles, his mother, at least,
asked nothing better than to see him on horseback or swinging a
golf-club.

"How did you come?--through the Glendarra woods?" he asked of Lydia. The
delight in his eyes as he turned them upon her was already evident to his
mother.

Lydia assented.

"Then you saw the rhododendrons? Jolly, aren't they?"

Lydia replied with ardour. There is a place in the Glendarra woods, where
the oaks and firs fall away to let a great sheet of rhododendrons sweep
up from the lowland into a mountain boundary of gray crag and tumbling
fern. Rose-pink, white and crimson, the waves of colour roll among the
rocks, till Cumbria might seem Kashmir. Lydia's looks sparkled, as she
spoke of it. The artist in her had feasted.

"Won't you come and paint it?" said Tatham bending forward eagerly.
"You'd make a glorious thing of it. Mother could send a motor for you so
easily. Couldn't you, mother?"

"D