Mr. Jerningham entered the park by that small gate through which Eustace Thorburn had passed six months before. Greenlands was very beautiful, even in this bleak winter weather, but there was a desolation and wildness in its aspect eminently calculated to foster melancholy thoughts. It was by the express wish of the master that the park had been permitted to assume this aspect of wildness and decay. “My good man,” he had said to his bailiff, “I assure you all this trimness and primness, which you make so much fuss about, is to the last degree unnecessary, so far as I am concerned. I shall never again come here to live for any length of time; and when I do come, it pleases me best to come and go as a stranger. Let those poor old dawdling men in the grounds take matters as quietly as they like. You will pay them their wages on Saturday just the same as if they did wonders in the way of sweeping, and pruning, and clipping. I don’t want Greenlands to look like a Dutchman’s garden; and I am glad to think that there is some kind of use in the world for poor dawdling old men who only excel in the art of not doing things.” The bailiff stared, but he obeyed his master, whose reputation for eccentricity had long been established at Greenlands. In the chill wintry morning the desolation of the place was more than usually apparent, and Mr. Jerningham, being on this particular occasion inclined to contemplate every object on the darker side, was strongly impressed by the dreariness of the long avenue, where the bare, black branches of the elms swayed to and fro against the winter sky, and where the withered leaves drifted before him with every gust of biting winter wind. It was in the avenue that had been the grand approach to the mansion in the days when the great world visited Greenlands, that Mr. Jerningham came upon a young man, sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, reading. To see any one seated on so cold a morning was in itself a fact for remark; but this hardy young student had the air of a man who takes his ease on a sofa in his own snug study, so absorbed was his manner, so comfortable his attitude. Approaching nearer, the _blasé_ wanderer in many lands perceived that the young student’s face was flushed as if with recent exercise, and, while perceiving this, he could not fail to observe that the face was one of the handsomest, and at the same time the noblest, he had ever looked upon. As an artist, Harold Jerningham was impressed by the perfect outline of that grand fair face; as an observer of mankind, he was conscious that the stamp of high thoughts had been set upon the countenance, and that the light of a pure young soul shone out of the eyes that were slowly raised to look at him as he drew near the log on which the student reclined. He went near enough to see the title of the book the young man was reading. It was one of the Platonic Dialogues, in Greek.