eral times, as good-humoured men do laugh at the prattle of innocent
childhood. Arrived at the pens he entered into a long and earnest
conversation with his head keeper, and the twins knew better than to
interrupt him with artless prattle at such a time as that. But going
home again through the dewy park, he unbent once more and egged Nancy on
to imitate the old starling, at which he roared melodiously. He was a
happy man that evening. He had come back to his kingdom, to the serious
business of life, which had a good deal to do with keepers and broods of
pheasants, and to his simple, domestic recreations, much enhanced by the
playful ways of his "pair of kittens."

The mellow light of the summer evening lay over the park, upon the thick
grass of which the shadows of the trees were lengthening. Sheep were
feeding on it, and it was flat round the house and rather uninteresting.
But it was the Squire's own; he had known every large tree since the
earliest days of his childhood, and the others he had planted, seeing
some of them grow to a respectable height and girth. He would have been
quite incapable of criticising it from the point of view of beauty. The
irregular roofs of the stables and other buildings, the innumerable
chimneys of the big house beyond them, seen through a gap in the trees
which hemmed it in for the most part on three sides, were also his own,
and objects so familiar that he saw them with eyes different from any
others that could have been turned upon them. The sight of them gave
him a sensation of pleasure quite unrelated to their aesthetic or even
their actual value. They meant home to him, and everything that he
loved in the world, or out of it. The pleasure was always there
subconsciously--not so much a pleasure as an attitude of mind--but this
evening it warmed into something concrete. "There's plenty of little
dicky-birds haven't got such a nest as my two," he said to the twins,
who failed to see that this speech, which they wriggled over, but
privately thought fatuous, had the elements of both poetry and religion.

In the meantime Cicely had made her way over the park in another
direction to visit her aunts in the dower-house, for she knew they would
be itching for an account of her adventures, and she had not had time to
write to them from London.

Aunt Ellen and Aunt Laura were the only surviving representatives of the
six spinster daughters of Colonel Thomas Clinton, the Squire's
grandfather