“You must make yourself quite at home here,” said his Lordship, as they rose from table. “I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I believe. I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and the grounds at your disposal,--horses in the stable,--guns in the hall,--here is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray make the most of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your pleasure, let me know.” All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether the fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe’s nature, or whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome, which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on a guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners, which were not simple by nature, but by art;--whatever it was, Redclyffe found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness and simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a game; and yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a subtleness in his nature, an unconscious tact,--which the mode of life and of mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,--that made this sort of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character; with whom, on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as any Englishman of them all. Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood, might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there were, the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles, which his foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell down upon this scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable life, was purely English, cultivated to the last extent without losing the nature out of a single thing. In the course of his walk he came to the spot where he had been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival in this region; and, examining the spot, he was startled to see that there was a path leading to the other side of a hedge, and this path, which led to the house, had brought him here.