ted it. Her Flamma foot tapped
the sacred sward.

Grandfather Iden, after mopping his mouth with his silk handkerchief,
began to point with his cudgel--a big hockey stick--at the various parts
of the building. This was Elizabethan, that dated from James II., that
went back to Henry VII., there were walls and foundations far more
ancient still, out of sight.

Really, it was a very interesting place archaeologically, if only you
could have got rid of the Pamments.

Amaryllis made no remark during this mumbling history. Iden thought she
was listening intently. At the conclusion he was just moving her--for
she was passive now, like a piece of furniture--when he spied some one
at a window.

Off came the great white hat, and down it swept till the top brushed the
grass in the depth of his homage. It was a bow that would have delighted
a lady, so evidently real in its intent, so full of the gentleman, so
thoroughly courtier-like, and yet honest. There was nothing to smile at
in that bow; there was not a young gentleman in Belgravia who could bow
in that way, for, in truth, we have forgotten how to bow in this
generation.

A writing and talking is always going on about the high place woman
occupies in modern society, but the fact is, we have lost our reverence
for woman as woman; it is after-dinner speech, nothing more, mere sham.
We don't venerate woman, and therefore we don't bow.

Grandfather Iden's bow would have won any woman's heart had it been
addressed to her, for there was veneration and courtesy, breeding, and
desire to please in it.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XVI.

THE man he had seen at the window was young Raleigh Pamment, the son and
heir.

He had been sitting in an easy chair, one leg over the arm, busy with a
memorandum book, a stump of pencil, and a disordered heap of telegrams,
letters, and newspapers.

Everybody writes to Mr. Gladstone, a sort of human lion's mouth for
post-cards, but Raleigh junior had not got to manage the House of
Commons, the revenue, the nation, the Turks, South Africa, the Nile,
Ganges, Indus, Afghanistan, sugar, shipping, and Homer.

Yet Raleigh junior had an occasional table beside him, from which the
letters, telegrams, newspapers, and scraps of paper had overflowed on to
the floor. In a company's offices it would have taken sixteen clerks to
answer that correspondence; this idle young aristocrat answered it
himself, entered it in his day book, "totted" i