“Now, don’t protest, Father. I am the lord of this domain; you are non-existent. You went to La Rochelle weeks ago (I vow I shall end by believing it myself). I am having a very special hiding-place made habitable for you in case of need; one in which I once shut up Gilbert for four hours, and whence nobody heard his yells. . . . I told my aunt that he had run away to sea—so likely! . . . I have also let it be known that I shall myself immediately shoot any informer.” “Surely you did not say that to my parishioners!” “Well, not in so many words; it did not seem necessary. But I read them a tremendous lecture on indiscretion. . . . Satan reproving sin, eh? Yet they listened to me as if I had been an archangel!” CHAPTER XXVIII LAND OF EXILE The decades of shearing and rolling undergone by the bowling-green had rendered it of a fabulous smoothness. Yet the bowl which a cunning hand had launched with confident care trickled slowly to rest a good half-inch from its goal. “Well, I’m hanged!” remarked Sir William Ashley, raising himself from his stooping posture. “George, you scoundrel, you’ve beaten your father. Where’s the filial respect of the present generation, hey?” Sir William was large and ruddy. As he now gazed jollily upon his victorious offspring his face had some kinship with the westering sun, which at the moment lighted his property, and glowed upon the dull-red brick of the Queen Anne house behind him, the trim box hedge, the very green grass, and upon his own blue coat and gilt buttons. “I’ll have no more to do with you, George,” continued his parent. “Here come the ladies—not to congratulate you, but to console me, I hope. My dears, this villain has had the effrontery to win, after all.” “I am sure, papa, that it is good for you,” responded the voice of Miss Amelia Ashley, as, dark, bright-eyed, and clad in a rose-sprigged muslin, she came through the opening in the yard-thick hedge. “And here is Lucienne thinks the same.” “Do you, Miss Lucy?” asked the Squire, turning towards the white figure which followed the pink. “No; I am sure that pretty head of yours never harboured such an idea.” “But no,” said Lucienne, smiling at him, in her slow, careful English, “I do not think so, for if it is good for you to lose, then is it perhaps bad for Monsieur Georges to win, and——” “Hear that, George?” broke in Sir William, slapping on the shoulder the tall, silent young man who had, to Lucienne’s eyes, so extraordinary a look of his cousin Gilbert. “Lucy don’t wish you ill; she has a care for your character.” “She is too kind,” said George. “Shall I get you chairs, Amelia?”