Yet love was never mentioned between them. They talked confidingly and happily; they did not know that they met purposely; there was a little timidity in both their bosoms, but it was timidity at their own feelings, not in the slightest degree at the fact of concealment. She called him Mr. Winslow, and he called her Miss Tracy, long after the names of Chandos and Rose came first to the lip. The quiet course of growing affection, however, was not altogether untroubled--it never is. A gay party came down to Mr. Tracy's, to eat his dinners and to shoot his pheasants. There were battues in the morning, and music and dancing in the evening; and the wind wafted merry sounds to the cottage of the gardener. Chandos was not without discomfort; not that he longed to mix again in the scenes in which he had so often taken part, to laugh with the joyous, to jest with the gay. But he longed to be by the side of Rose Tracy; and when he thought of her surrounded by the bright, the wealthy, and the great; when he remembered that she was beautiful, graceful, captivating, one of the co-heiresses of a man of great wealth; when he recollected that there was no tie between him and her, he began to fear that the bitterest drops of the bitter cup of fortune were yet to be drank. He knew not all which that cup might still contain. When they went not out early to shoot, the guests at Northferry House sometimes would roam through the grounds, occasionally with their inviter or his daughters, occasionally alone; and one day, when an expedition to a high moor in the neighbourhood, where there was excellent wild shooting, had been put off till the afternoon, a gay nobleman, who fluttered between Emily and Rose, perfectly confident of captivating either or both if he chose, exclaimed as they all left the breakfast table, "I shall go and talk to your gardener, Tracy. Such a fellow must be a curiosity, as much worth seeing as a bonassus.--A gardener who talks Latin and quotes poetry! Upon my life you are a favoured man! Will you not go and introduce me, Miss Tracy, to this scientific son of Adam, whom your father has told me of." "Excuse me, my lord," answered Emily, "your lordship will need no introduction. I have a letter to write for post." "Will not the fair Rose take compassion on me, then?" asked Viscount Overton. "Who but the Rose should introduce one to the gardener?" "Roses are not found on the stalk in the winter, my good lord," replied General Tracy for his niece, who, he saw, was somewhat annoyed. "But I will be your introducer, if needful, though, according to the phrase of old playwrights and novelists, a gentleman of _your figure_ carries his own introduction with him." "General, you are too good," replied the other, with an air of mingled self-satisfaction and persiflage. "But really that was an excellent jest of yours--I must remember it--Roses are not found _on the stalk_ in the winter! Capital! Do you make many jests?"