‘Now, Mr. Goring,’ said Daphne, when she and Gerald and the old lady had rejoined the others, ‘how do you feel about that Channel Island cow?’ ‘Oh, I am content,’ answered Gerald, laughing at her. ‘I submit to the extortion; you carry matters with such a high hand that if you were to demand all my flocks and herds I should hardly feel surprised.’ ‘Mrs. Baker,’ said Daphne, with a businesslike air, ‘this gentleman is going to give you a cow.’ ‘Oh, miss, you don’t mean it, surely!’ murmured Mrs. Baker, overcome with confusion. ‘Yes; a lovely fawn-coloured, hazel-eyed Alderney. Don’t refuse her. He can as well afford to give you a cow as I can to give you a neck-ribbon. When would you like the animal sent home? To-morrow morning? Yes, of course; to-morrow morning. You hear, Mr. Goring? And now you may consider yourself forgiven, and I’ll show you the visitors’-book and all the interesting autographs.’ They went over to the table near the window, and turned the leaves of that volume! Alas! how many a hand that had written in it was now dust. Here was the signature of Charles Dickens, nearly thirty years old, and pale with age. But the descendant of the Hathaways remembered the day when it was written, and recalled the visit with pride. ‘He took the book out into the garden, and sat on the stone slab over the well to write his name,’ she said. ‘I remember how full of life and fun he and Mr. Mark Lemon were; he was laughing as he wrote, and he looked at everything, and was so pleased and so pleasant.’ Sir Walter Scott’s name was in an older book. Both of these were as dead—and as undying—as Shakespeare. And compared with these two immortal names all the rest of the signatures in the big book were zero. It was the merriest tea-party imaginable. Mrs. Baker’s best Pembroke table had been brought into the middle of the room; her best teapot and cups and saucers were set out upon it. Cakes and hot-house fruit had been liberally supplied by Mrs. Spicer. Daphne whispered in her sister’s ear a request that Mrs. Baker might be invited to join them, to which Madoline nodded a smiling assent. Was not the descendant of the Hathaways a lady by right of her gentle manners and ancient descent? She belonged to a class that is an honour to the land—the honest independent yeoman who tills the soil his forefathers cultivated before him. The birth and death sheet in the oak chest upstairs was like a patent of nobility. And yet perhaps not one of these agricultural Hathaways had ever enjoyed as large an income as a first-class mechanic in a manufacturing town—a man who dies and leaves not a rap behind him to show that he was once respectable. They had been upheld in their places by the pride of race, which the mechanic knows not.