Geoffrey Arbuthnot had not been smiled on by Fortune. Nevertheless, he possessed gifts which for the simple hourly manufacture of human contentment are better worth than the bigger favours of the gods. Life interested him. If he had had few artificial pleasures, he had exhausted no pleasures at all. In regard of nature, his sensations were vivid as a child’s. Walking forth to Tintajeux Manoir at an hour when the crisp blue and gold of afternoon had reached declension, Geoffrey felt youth run in his veins like wine. The hay and clover smells from the newly-cut fields; the ‘kiss sweet! kiss sweet!’ of the thrushes; the verdured hedges touched still by Spring’s immaturity, though the flower of the May was past; the peeps at every turn of purple salt water; the road-side ferns through which, knee-deep, he waded; the yellowing honeysuckle sprays which brushed his face; the streamlets slipping seaward away, through channels thick with cresses and forget-me-nots; ay, even the whiffs of wood-smoke from the farmhouse chimneys, the incomprehensible Froissart French in which he heard the haymakers chattering to each other over their bread and cider,--all the low, melodious notes of this homely landscape affected him with a physical and keen delight. His life, since remotest baby-days, when he walked holding his mother’s hand in blithe, fair Scotland, had been passed among streets and among the human creatures who inhabit them. The pleasure of the Bethnal Green arab who, at six years old, first handles a living daisy, differs, in degree only, from Geoffrey’s as he trudged along through the Guernsey lanes, his mind vaguely fixed on Tintajeux Manoir and on the chill reception from his future pupil which there awaited him. Would Miss Bartrand’s thunder glances be discharged from black eyes or blue ones? Geoffrey had reached a stretch of undulating rushy common at the extreme western point of the island when this question presented itself. Ahead was a vista of mouldering banks, gay in their shroud of blue-flowered, ivy-leaved campanula, and with here and there a jutting tip of granite, crimson, by reason of its glittering mica, in the sunset. Above hovered a falcon, almost lost to view against the largely-vaulted, bountifully-coloured evening sky.