“Ho, ho!” thought Mr. Jerningham; “I took my young gentleman for a gamekeeper, or the son of my bailiff; but even in this levelling age I doubt if gamekeepers or embryo bailiffs are so far advanced in Greek. I suppose he is a friend of De Bergerac’s.” Having arrived at this conclusion, Mr. Jerningham proceeded to accost the young dreamer, for whom that leafless avenue was peopled day by day with the images of all that was greatest and most beautiful in the golden age of this earth, and to whom the romantic desolation of Greenlands had become far dearer within the last four months than it had ever been to the lord of mansion and park, forest and upland. “Do you not find it rather cold for that kind of reading?” asked the proprietor of the avenue. The frank young face was turned to him with a smile. “Not at all; I have been walking for the last hour, and feel as warm as if it were midsummer.” He looked just a little wonderingly at Mr. Jerningham as he spoke. He knew all the visitors to the Grange, and assuredly this gentleman in a fur-lined overcoat was not one of them. Some stranger, perhaps, who had found the gate open, and had strayed into the park out of curiosity. “You seem accustomed to this kind of open-air study,” said the traveller, seating himself on one end of the fallen log, in order to get a better view of the student’s face. It was only the listless curiosity of an idler that beguiled him into loitering thus. He had for the latter years of his life been at best only a loiterer upon the highways and byways of this world, and the interest which he felt in this young student of Plato was the same kind of interest he might have felt in a solitary little Savoyard with white mice, or some semi-idiotic old reaper, toiling under a southern sun; an interest by no means so warm as that which a picture or a statue inspired in this jaded wanderer. “Yes,” replied the young man; “I spend all my leisure mornings in the park, reading and thinking. I fancy one thinks better when one walks in such a place as this.” “If by ‘one’ you speak of _yourself_, I have no doubt you are right; but if your ‘one’ means mankind in general, I am sure you are wrong. My dreariest thoughts have come to me under these trees this morning.” The young man’s face was quick to express sympathy, in a look that was half wonder, half pity. “How quick a man’s sympathies are at his age!” thought Harold Jerningham, “and how soon they wear out!” And then, after a pause, he added, aloud, “You live somewhere near at hand, I suppose?” “I live very near at hand; I live in the park.” “At the great house!” exclaimed Mr. Jerningham. “After all, my handsome young student will turn out to be the self-educated son or nephew of my housekeeper,” he thought, not without some slight sense of vexation; for he had been studying the young man’s profile, and had given him credit for patrician blood on the strength of the delicate modelling of nose and chin.