‘You’ll hear them again often, I hope. Nilsson was singing the other night, when I took my mother to hear Wagner’s great opera. The music is quite the rage, I believe; but I don’t like it as well as “Don Giovanni.”’ Luncheon was over by this time—a formal ceremonious luncheon, such as Daphne detested. It was her punishment for having been uncivil last night when the picnic idea was mooted. And now they all repaired to the gardens, and perambulated the parterre, and criticised the statues: Leda with her swan, Venus with an infant Cupid, Hebe offering her cup, Ganymede on his eagle—all the most familiar personages in Lemprière. The fountains were sending up their rainbow spray in the blazing afternoon sun. The geraniums, and calceolarias, and pansies, and petunias, and all the tribe of begonias, and house-leeks, newly bedded out, seemed to quiver in the fierce bright light. ‘For pity’s sake let us get out of this burning flowery furnace,’ cried Gerald. ‘Let’s go to the rose-garden; it’s on the shady side of the house, and within reach of my mother’s favourite tulip-trees.’ The rose-garden was a blessed refuge after that exposed parterre facing due south. Here there was velvet turf on which to walk, and here were trellised screens and arches wreathed with the yellow clusters of the Celine Forestier, and the Devoniensis. Mrs. Ferrers was a person who always discoursed of flowers by their botanical or fashionable names. She did not call a rose a rose, but went into raptures over a Marguerite de St. Armand, a Garnet Wolseley, a Gloire de Vitry, or an Etienne Levet, as the case might be. Here, smoking his cigar, which he politely suppressed at their approach, they discovered Mr. MacCloskie, the hard-faced, sandy-haired Scottish gardener. ‘You have been taking a look at my grounds, I hear, MacCloskie,’ Mr. Goring said pleasantly. ‘Yes, sir; I’ve looked about me a bit. I think I’ve seen pretty well everything.’ ‘And the hot-houses leave room for improvement, I suppose?’ ‘Well, sir, I’m not wishing to say anything disrespectful to your architect,’ began MacCloskie, with that deliberation which gave all his speeches an air of superior wisdom, ‘but if he had tried his hardest to spend the maximum of money in attaining the minimum of space and accommodation—to say nothing of his ventilation and his heating apparatus, which are just abominable—he couldn’t have succeeded better than he has—unconsciously.’ ‘Dear me, Mr. MacCloskie, that’s a bad account. And yet the gardeners here have managed to rub on very decently for a quarter of a century, with no better accommodation than you have seen to-day.’ ‘Ay, sir, that’s where it is. They just roobed on, poor fellows. And I can only say that it’s very creditable to them to do as well as they have done, and if they’re about a quarter of a century behind the times nobody can blame them.’ ‘Then we must build new houses—that’s inevitable, I conclude.’ ‘Yes, sir, if you want to grow exotics.’