“And then I see the SHOPS,” she said; and by the tone of subdued ecstacy with which she pronounced this word, Eustace discovered for the first time that she was mortal. “I am afraid you will despise me very much for liking to see the shops. Papa does. He thinks it is the most foolish thing in the world to be fond of standing on a crowded pavement to look at dresses and bonnets that one is never likely to have.” “Or to want,” interposed M. de Bergerac, looking proudly at the girl’s animated face. “What could a little girl who makes butter do with fine silk dresses; and she is able to make butter for Windsor market, this young lady, as well as she is able to read Greek,” added the father, fondly. Eustace watched the two faces with a pensive admiration. Here was that ideal father of whom he had dreamed so often; here was that pure and perfect love which he had fancied. It was late before the little party separated, for M. de Bergerac had a student’s attachment to the quiet of midnight, and an absent-minded man’s unconsciousness of the flight of time. The clock of some village church-tower, hidden away somewhere beyond the beeches and oaks of Greenlands, struck twelve half an hour before the Frenchman conducted Eustace to the room that had been prepared for him. It was only a rustic chamber, with lattice casements set deep in a wall of old-fashioned solidity. The white draperies were faintly perfumed with that odour of rose-leaves and lavender which is as the very breath of the country. The lattice was open, and there was a vase of flowers on the broad window-ledge. Eustace wondered who had arranged those flowers. Not the trim little maid-servant surely. _She_ would have squeezed the tender blossoms into a tightly-packed circular bunch; while these were only a few loose half-budding roses nestling among cool green leaves. The lattice was open, and the harvest-moon shone full and bright above the woods of which Harold Jerningham was master. Eustace stood at the open casement for some time after his host had left him. He stood there in the solemn stillness, looking out across those sombre masses of foliage towards the moonlit river--so difficult to believe in by this light as an earthly river, navigable by coal-barges, and instrumental in the turning of paper-mills. He looked out upon that landscape of semi-divine beauty, and thought with a half-contemptuous pity of the man who owned it. Theodore de Bergerac had talked of his friend during the varied course of that evening’s conversation, and Eustace had discovered that the lord of Greenlands was a lonely and childless wanderer--a wanderer in first-class carriages, and a dweller in the most expensive caravanseries; but not the less homeless, and joyless, and purposeless--not the less a standing example of the worthlessness of earthly prosperity.