till of tender years. Of gardeners,
keepers, cow-men, chauffeurs, footmen, stablemen--full twenty were
supported on those fifteen hundred acres that formed the little Becket
demesne. Of agricultural laborers proper--that vexed individual so much
in the air, so reluctant to stay on 'the Land,' and so difficult to
house when he was there, there were fortunately none, so that it was
possible for Stanley, whose wife meant him to 'put up' for the Division,
and his guests, who were frequently in Parliament, to hold entirely
unbiassed and impersonal views upon the whole question so long as they
were at Becket.

It was beautiful there, too, with the bright open fields hedged with
great elms, and that ever-rich serenity of its grass and trees. The
white house, timbered with dark beams in true Worcestershire fashion,
and added-to from time to time, had preserved, thanks to a fine
architect, an old-fashioned air of spacious presidency above its gardens
and lawns. On the long artificial lake, with innumerable rushy nooks
and water-lilies and coverture of leaves floating flat and bright in
the sun, the half-tame wild duck and shy water-hens had remote little
worlds, and flew and splashed when all Becket was abed, quite as if the
human spirit, with its monkey-tricks and its little divine flame, had
not yet been born.

Under the shade of a copper-beech, just where the drive cut through into
its circle before the house, an old lady was sitting that afternoon on
a campstool. She was dressed in gray alpaca, light and cool, and had on
her iron-gray hair a piece of black lace. A number of Hearth and Home
and a little pair of scissors, suspended by an inexpensive chain from
her waist, rested on her knee, for she had been meaning to cut out for
dear Felix a certain recipe for keeping the head cool; but, as a fact,
she sat without doing so, very still, save that, now and then, she
compressed her pale fine lips, and continually moved her pale fine
hands. She was evidently waiting for something that promised excitement,
even pleasure, for a little rose-leaf flush had quavered up into a face
that was colored like parchment; and her gray eyes under regular and
still-dark brows, very far apart, between which there was no semblance
of a wrinkle, seemed noting little definite things about her, almost
unwillingly, as an Arab's or a Red Indian's eyes will continue to note
things in the present, however their minds may be set on the future. So
sat Fr