He was as near happiness in this bright summer-tide as a mortal can hope to be. The greater part of his days were spent with Daphne, and Daphne was always delighted. True that she was changeable as the light July winds, and that there were times when she most unmercifully snubbed him. But to be snubbed by her was better than the smiles and blandishments of other women. She was given to that coyness and skittishness, the _grata protervitas_, which seems to have been the chief fascination of the professional beauty of the Augustan era. She was as coy as Chloe; coquettish as Glycera; fickle as Lydia, who, supposing there was only one lady of that name, and she a real personage, was rather too bad. Daphne was half-a-dozen girls is one; sometimes welcoming her swain so sweetly that he felt sure she loved him, and the next day turning from him with scornful impatience, as if his very presence were weariness to her. He bore it all. ‘Being her slave what could he do,’ etc. He had Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and was somewhat of the slavish lover therein depictured. His Lydia might flout him to-day, and he was just as ready to fetch and carry for her on the morrow. She had changed, and for the worse, since the sweet fresh early summer-tide when they two had breakfasted _tête-à-tête_ in the boat-house. She was not so even-tempered. She was ever so much more capricious and exacting; and she was prone to gloomy intervals which anyone other than a lover might have ascribed to sulks. Edgar wondered, not without sorrow, at the change; but it was not in him to blame her. He made all manner of excuses. Bad health was, perhaps, at the root of these discords. She might be a victim to obscure neuralgic pains and aches, which she heroically concealed from her friends—albeit her fair and fresh appearance belied the supposition. Perhaps it was the weather which made her occasionally cross. Who could go on in simpering placidity with the thermometer at ninety in the shade? ‘And then we spoil her,’ argued Edgar, urging his final plea. ‘She is so bewitching that one can’t help spoiling her. Madoline spoils her. I am an idiot about her; and even Goring, for all his contemptuous airs and graces, is almost as easily fooled by her as the rest of us. If we were more rational in our treatment of her, she would be less faulty. But then her very faults are charming.’ It had been, or had seemed to be, an utterly happy summer for everybody at South Hill. Two months of splendid weather; two months wasted in picnicking, and excursionising, driving, boating, lawn-tennis, tea-drinking, journeying to and fro between South Hill and Goring Abbey to watch the progress of the hot-houses, which, despite the unlimited means of their proprietor, progressed with a provoking slowness. For some little time after Gerald’s arrival Daphne had held herself as much as possible in the background. She had tried to keep aloof from the life of the two lovers; but this Madoline would not suffer.