s time."

"What do letters matter to us?"

"That we can't tell until we see them."

They went in out of the sunshine to their arm-chairs in the shade. The
English mail had arrived, and it was very interesting. Letters from
lords and ladies, piles of papers of fashionable intelligence, voices
from that world which one of the pair had already begun to hanker to be
back in, although not yet distinctly conscious of it. The bride fetched
her work-basket, and busied herself with a piece of useless embroidery,
while the bridegroom read aloud to her passages from the epistles of
his titled correspondents, and from the printed chronicles of their
doings here and there. She had dreamed of his reading again the sort of
things that he used to read, while she sewed and listened; but in the
life that he had lived and grown to there had been no room for learning
and the arts. He had dropped them, with his health and his
horsemanship, long ago. The coroneted letters and the MORNING POST
occupied them until luncheon.

At luncheon, as at every other meal--despite the new husband's
expressed desire to have his wife to himself--his valet was present as
butler, watching over the dyspeptic's diet, and seeing that the wine
was right. Neither master nor man trusted anybody else to do this. It
was a large crumple in Deb's rose-leaf, Manton's limpet-like attachment
to Claud, who seemed unable to do anything without his servant's help,
and the latter's cool relegation of herself to the second place in the
MENAGE. It was all very well for HER to give her husband the premier
place--she did it gladly--but for Manton to take possession of Redford
as a mere appendage of his lord's was quite another matter. It was
still the honeymoon, and he might do as he liked--or rather, as Claud
liked; but it was not difficult to foresee the day when the valet who
dictated to her cook would become too much for the proud spirit of the
lady of the house, with whom it had ever been dangerous to make too
free--or to foretell what would happen then.

Claud dozed through the afternoon--like most idle and luxurious men, he
drank a great deal of wine, which made him sleepy--and Deb took the
opportunity to go all through her house and put everything in order.
They met again at tea, and had a stroll about the garden, arm-in-arm
and happy. Dinner was a rather silent function. Deb wished for Jim, and
regretted her easy abandonment of him; Claud never talked when he was
e