John's heart leaped with delight at the idea. It was natural. He was indeed most sincerely attached to the Ambroses, and most heartily glad to be with them; but he had never in his life had an opportunity of staying in a "big" house, as he would have described it. It seemed as though he were already beginning to taste the sweet first-fruits of success after all his labour and all his privations; it was the first taste of another world, the first mouthful of the good things of life which had fallen to his lot. Instantly there rose before him delicious visions of hot-water cans brought by a real footman, of luxurious meals served by a real butler, of soft carpets perpetually beneath his feet, of liberty to lounge in magnificent chairs in the magnificent library; and last, though not least, there was a boyish feeling of delight in the thought that when he went to see Mrs. Goddard he would go from the Hall, that she would perhaps associate him henceforth with a different kind of existence, in a word, that he was sure to acquire importance in her eyes from the fact of his visit to the squire. Many a young fellow of one and twenty is as familiar with all that money can give and as tired of luxury as a broken-down hard liver of forty years; for this is an age of luxurious living. But poor John had hardly ever tasted the least of those things too familiar to the golden youth of the period to be even noticed. He had felt when he first entered the little drawing-room of the cottage that Mrs. Goddard herself belonged, or had belonged, to that delicious unknown world of ease where the question of expense was never considered, much less mentioned. In her own eyes she was indeed living in a state approaching to penury, but the spectacle of her pictures, her furniture and her bibelots had impressed John with a very different idea. The squire's invitation, asking him to spend a week at the Hall, seemed in a moment to put him upon the same level as the woman to whom he believed himself so devotedly attached. To his mind the ideal woman could not but be surrounded by a luxurious atmosphere of her own. To enter the charmed precincts of those surroundings seemed to John equivalent to being transported from the regions of the Theocritan to the level of the Anacreontic ode, from the pastoral, of which he had had too much, to the aristocratic, of which he felt that he could not have enough. It was a natural feeling in a very young man of his limited experience.