Mrs. Baker was installed in the place of honour in front of the tea-tray, and asked everyone in her nice old-fashioned way whether their tea was to their liking. Upon being coaxed to talk she told stories about the defunct Hathaways, and explained how the house that had once been all one dwelling-place had come to be divided. It was Daphne and she who supplied the conversation. The two young men looked on amused; Edgar openly admiring the bright changeful face under the little Swiss hat. Lina was pleased that her sister should be so innocently glad. ‘O, how happy I am,’ cried Daphne suddenly, in a pause of the talk, clasping her hands above her head in a kind of ecstasy. ‘If it could only last!’ ‘Why should it not last?’ asked Edgar, in his matter-of-fact way. Gerald looked at her gravely, with a puzzled look. Yes; this was the girl who had stood in the dazzling sunshine beside the lake at Fontainebleau, in whose hand he had read the forecast of an evil fate. ‘God help her!’ he thought, ‘she is so impulsive—such a creature of the moment. How is such an one to travel safely through the thorny ways of life? Happily there seems little fear of thorniness for her footsteps. Here is my honest Turchill dying for her—and just the kind of man to make her an excellent husband, and give the lie to palmistry. Yet it seems a common place fate; almost as vulgar as the Italian warehouse in Oxford Street.’ He sat musing thus in the lazy afternoon atmosphere, and watching Daphne with something of an artistic rather than an actually friendly interest. It seemed a shallow nature that must be always expressing itself in speech or movement. There could be no depth of thought allied with such vivacity—keenness of feeling, perhaps, but for the moment only. Nobody was in a hurry to leave the cottage. Tea-drinking is of all sensualities the most intellectual. The mind is refreshed rather than the body. There was nothing coarse in the meal. The golden tinge of the almond pound-cake—a master work of Mrs. Spicer’s—contrasted with the purple bloom of grapes and blue-gages, the olive tint of ripe figs. ‘We are making such a tremendous meal that I’m afraid we shall none of us do justice to my mother’s dinner,’ remonstrated Edgar at last, ‘and that will make her miserable.’ ‘A quarter to seven,’ said Gerald, stealing a glance at a little effeminate watch. ‘Don’t you think it is time we should descend from this Shakespearian empyrean to common earth?’ This was the signal for a general move. The heavy, comfortable-looking old carriage-horses had been walked up and down in shady places, while the portly coachman dozed on his box, and the more vivacious footman execrated the flies. And now the landau bowled briskly along the smooth high road to Hawksyard, containing as cheerful a quartette as ever went out to dinner.