cere; nobody ever knew--had stayed
in Florence, and Varian had been obliged to come without him to the
house-party.

On a straw cushion, a cup in her strong white hand, a bunch of adoring
young girls at her feet, sat Mrs. Dud. Rosy and firm-cheeked, crisp
in stiff white duck, deliriously contrasted with her fluffy
Parisian parasol, she scorned the softening ruffles of her presumable
contemporaries; her delicately squared chin, for the most part held
high, showed a straight white collar under a throat only a little fuller
than the girlish ones all around her.

Old Dudley himself strolled about the group, gossiping here and there
with some pretty woman, sending the grave servants from one to another
with some particularly desirable sandwich, "rubbing it in," as he said
to the men who had failed to touch his score on the links, tantalizingly
uncertain as to which one of the young women he would invite to lead
the cotillon with him at the club dance that week: none of the young men
could take his place at that, as they themselves enviously admitted.

What a well-matched couple it was! What a lot they got out of life!
Varian walked quietly by the group, to enjoy better the pretty, modish
picture they made. Their quick chatter, their bursts of laughter, the
sweet faint odor of the tea, the gay dresses and light flannels, with
the quiet, sombrely attired servants to add tone, all gave him, fresh
from Hunter's quick sense of the effective, an appreciation that gained
force from his separateness; he walked farther away to get a different
point of view.

He was out of any path now, and suddenly, hardly beyond reach of
their voices, he found himself in a part of the grounds he had never
approached before. A thick high hedge shut in a kind of court at the
side and back of the great house, and a solid wooden door, carefully
matched to its green, left open by accident, showed a picture so out
of line with the succession of vivid scenes that dazzled the visitor at
Wilton Bluffs that he stopped involuntarily. The rectangle was
carpeted with the characteristic emerald turf of the place, divided by
intersecting red brick paths into four regular squares. In the farther
corner of each of these a trim green clothes-tree was planted, all
abloom with snowy fringed napkins that shone dazzling white against the
hedge. One of the squares was a neat little kitchen-garden; parsley was
there in plenty, and other vaguely familiar green things, c