The daylight by now had gone into odorous dew-freshened dusk; a big solitary planet looked down upon the woods of Tintajeux. Geff felt himself in a new world, a thousand miles removed from pale, work-a-day, prosaic England. The affluence of air and sea, the largeness of sky, took possession of him, played in his blood, evoked that precise condition of mind and body which is so often at four-and-twenty the prelude to human passion. The talk of Andros Bartrand accorded well with the scene and moment. They spoke of men, measures, books--of books chiefly. ‘I belong, really, to the eighteenth century,’ said the Seigneur, as, with his hand on Geff’s arm, they paced the lawn’s goodly limits. Old Andros had the vanity of his age in seeking to exaggerate it. He had been known, or so Marjorie would affirm, to speak of himself as alive at the dawn of the French Revolution. Perhaps you appreciated his real age best when you reflected that the bride of his youth might have been a contemporary of Emma Woodhouse! ‘I was born before moral pulse-feeling came into fashion. This modern verse--“singing, maugre the music”--don’t please me. I never mix my wines. I like to take my verse and my philosophy separate. Hand-made paper, rough edges, vellum, constitute poetry nowadays, don’t they!’ ‘The æsthetic fever is on us still, sir, I fear.’ ‘In regard to Church matters, I was middle-aged, mind, when Tract 90 decimated the country. Tractarian or Evangelical, Theist or Pantheist--the Church went on quite as profitably before parsons began calling each other by such a variety of names.’ ‘Names that all mean the same thing,’ Geoffrey suggested, ‘if men had temper enough to examine them coolly.’ ‘Possibly. Let me direct your attention to my young wheat. You see it in the enclosure, just between that red stable roof and the orchard. I mean to cut my wheat with the Guernsey sickle, Mr. Arbuthnot, the same pattern of sickle, it is believed, that was used under Louis XI. I mean to get more for my wheat per quarter than any grower in England. There is the advantage of being a Channel Island farmer. One may not only be a Conservative, but, like certain great statesmen, make one’s Conservatism pay.’ A resonant call from Marjorie summoned them before long to the tea-table--a meal at which old Andros with his grand-seigneur air made his guest pleasantly welcome. The dinner-hour at Tintajeux was five, the ‘late dinner’ of Andros Bartrand’s youth. By half-past eight, in this keen Atlantic air, broiled mullet, hot potato scones, with other indigenous Guernsey dishes, were adjuncts to the tea-table which no healthily-minded person could afford to despise. Afterwards came a cigar smoked just inside the open French windows. ‘At a hundred years old,’ the Seigneur apologised, ‘there was one thing a man might not brave with impunity--night air.’ And then Geoffrey Arbuthnot prepared to take his leave.