this
would be easy in itself, but it was rendered much more difficult by the
fact that Hawtrey would expect him to accomplish it without unduly
daunting her. Her letter had certainly suggested courage, but, after
all, it was as he reflected the courage of ignorance, and he had now
some notion of the life of ease and refinement her English friends led.
He was commencing to feel sorry for Agatha Ismay.

CHAPTER VII.

AGATHA DOES NOT FLINCH.

Next evening Wyllard sat with Mrs. Radcliffe in a big low-ceilinged
room at Garside Scar, looking about him with quiet interest. He had
now and then spent a day or two in huge Western hotels, but he had
never seen anything quite like that room. The sheer physical comfort
of its arrangements appealed to him, but after all he was not one who
had ever studied his bodily ease very much, and what he regarded as the
chaste refinement of its adornment had a deeper effect. Though he had
lived for the most part in the bush and on the prairie, he had been
endued with or had somehow acquired an artistic susceptibility.

The furniture was old, and perhaps a trifle shabby, but it was, as he
noticed, of beautiful design. Curtains, carpets, tinted walls, formed,
it seemed to him, a harmony of soft colouring, and there were scattered
here and there dainty works of art, little statuettes from Italy, and
wonderful Indian ivory and silver work. Then a row of low,
stone-ribbed windows pierced the front of the room, and looking out he
saw the trim garden lying in the warm evening light. Immediately
beneath the windows ran a broad gravelled terrace, which was apparently
raked smooth every day, with a row of urns in which hyacinths bloomed
upon its pillared wall. From the middle of it a wide stairway led down
to the wonderful velvet lawn, which was dotted with clumps of cupressus
with golden gleams in it, and beyond that clipped yews rose smooth and
solid as a rampart of stone.

It all impressed him curiously--the order and beauty of it, the signs
of loving care. It gave him a key, he fancied, to the lives the
cultured English led, for there was no sign of strain and fret and
stress and hurry here. Everything, it seemed, went smoothly with
rhythmic regularity, and though it is possible that a good many
Englishmen would have regarded Garside Scar as a very second-rate
country house, and seen in Major Radcliffe and his wife nothing more
than a somewhat prosy old soldier and a withered l