s a small estate eight miles from
here, and three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and
three days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction. To-
day he is due to come here. It is a great boon to have such an
opportunity for getting the boys educated, and of course it helps him to
earn a living."

"And the society of the place?" asked the Frenchman.

His hostess laughed.

"I must admit it has to be looked for with a strong pair of
field-glasses," she said; "it is almost as difficult to get a good bridge
four together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a
subscription dance in our particular corner of England. One has to
ignore distances and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious even on
a limited scale. There are one or two officials who are our chief social
mainstays, but the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under
the same roof at the same moment. A road will be impassable in one
quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent
some one else from coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever.
When my little girl gave a birthday party here her only little girl guest
had come twelve miles to attend it. The Forest officer happened to drop
in on us that evening, so we felt quite festive."

The Frenchman's eyes grew round in wonder. He had once thought that the
capital city of a Balkan kingdom was the uttermost limit of social
desolation, viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there at any rate one
could get cafe chantant, tennis, picnic parties, an occasional theatre
performance by a foreign troupe, now and then a travelling circus, not to
speak of Court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable
character. Here, it seemed, one went a day's journey to reach an
evening's entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tired official took
on the nature of a festivity. He looked round again at the rolling
stretches of brown hills; before he had regarded them merely as the
background to this little shut-away world, now he saw that they were
foreground as well. They were everything, there was nothing else. And
again his glance travelled to the face of his hostess, with its bright,
pleasant eyes and smiling mouth.

"And you live here with your children," he said, "here in this
wilderness? You leave England, you leave everything, for this?"

His hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the verandah.