The place was very lonely. There was nobody to interfere with Daphne’s pleasure, or even to object to the collie, who crept meekly to her side, held by a strap, and casting longing looks at the distant oxen. She wandered about in the loneliest bits of the park, supremely indifferent to rules and regulations as to where she might go and where she might not; till she finally deposited her basket and sunshade under a stalwart oak, and sat down at the foot thereof, with Goldie still strapped, and constrained to virtue. She fastened one end of the strap to the lowest branch of the tree, Goldie standing on end licking her hands all the time. ‘Now, dear, you are as comfortable as in your own stable-yard. You can admire the cows and sheep in the distance, standing about so peacefully in the sunshine, as if they had never heard of sunstroke, but you can’t hunt them. And now you shall have your dinner.’ It was a very quiet picnic, perhaps even a trifle dull; though, at the worst, it might be better to picnic alone among the four-footed beasts in Charlecote Park, than to assume a forced gaiety in a party of stupid people, at the conventional banquet of doubtful lobster and tepid champagne, in one of the time-honoured haunts of the cockney picknicker. Daphne thought of Midsummer-day in the year that was gone, as she sat eating her chicken and sipping her lemonade, half of which had been lost in the process of uncorking. How gay she had been, how foolishly, unreasonably glad! And now a great deal of the flavour had gone out of life since her seventeenth birthday. ‘How happy Lina looks, now that the time for her lover’s return draws near!’ she thought. ‘She has something to look forward to, some reason for counting the days; while to me time is all alike, one week just the same as another. I am a horribly selfish creature. I ought to feel glad of her gladness I ought to rejoice in her joy. But Nature made me out of poor stuff, didn’t she, Goldie dear?’ She laid her bright head on the collie’s tawny coat. The pale gold of her soft flowing hair contrasted and yet harmonised with the ruddy hue of the dog, and made a picture fair to look upon. But there was no one wandering in Charlecote Park to paint Daphne’s portrait. She was very lucky in not being discovered by a party of eager Americans, spectacled, waterproofed, hyper-intelligent, and knowing a great deal more about Shakespeare’s biography than is known to the duller remnant of the Anglo-Saxon race still extant on this side the Atlantic.