with a gleaming water nymph. A
broad grass pathway led them to the house, so that guests emerging from
it arrived in rather spectacular fashion--well seen, against the ivied
walls of the castle, to the unfair advantage, as usual, of grace and good
looks.

Before hostess or neighbours appeared, however, Mr. Delorme and a certain
Gerald Tatham, Lady Tatham's brother-in-law, had the green circle to
themselves. Gerald Tatham was one of the uninvited guests. He considered
himself entitled to descend on Duddon twice a year, and generally left it
having borrowed money of his nephew, in elaborate forgetfulness of a
similar transaction twelve months earlier still undischarged. He was
married, but his wife did not pay visits with him. Victoria greatly
preferred her--plain and silent as she was--to her husband; but realizing
what a relief it must be to a woman to get such a man off her hands as
often as possible, she never pressed her to come to Duddon. Meanwhile
Gerald Tatham passed as an agreeable person, well versed in all those
affairs of his neighbours which they would gladly have kept to
themselves, and possessed of certain odd pockets of knowledge, sporting
or financial, which helped him to earn the honest or doubtful pennies on
which his existence depended.

Delorme and he got on excellently. Gerald respected the painter as a
person whose brush, in a strangely constituted world, was able to supply
him with an income which even the sons of land or commerce might envy;
and secretly despised him for a lack of grandfathers, for his crop of
black curls, his southern complexion and his foreign birth. Delorme
thought Gerald an idler of no account, and perceived in him the sure
signs of a decadence which was rapidly drawing the English aristocratic
class into the limbo of things that were. But Gerald was an insatiable
hawker of gossip; and a fashionable painter, with an empire among young
and pretty women, must keep himself well stocked with that article.

So the two walked up and down together, talking pleasantly enough.
Presently Delorme, sweeping a powerful hand before him, exclaimed on
the beauty of the castle and its surroundings.

"Yes--a pretty place," said Gerald, carelessly, "and, for once, money
enough to keep it up."

"Your nephew is a lucky fellow. Why don't they marry him."

"No hurry! When it does come off my sister-in-law will do something
absurd."

"Something sentimental? I'll bet you she doesn't! Democracy