She thought he left her very willingly, and hurried on with the conviction that, like everything else, it would come right—quite right—in the end. She was very happy if in any way she had helped it to come right—so happy that she longed to be alone with her sensations, and revolted with all her soul against the immediate necessity of Sir William Scott and the St. Georges. To be for a few hours quite alone, unseen and unknown, in the heart of some empty green wilderness like this, would help her, she knew, to rationalise her satisfaction. “My dear boy,” she said, with nervous patience, as Captain Thrush appeared in search of her, “did you think I had fallen into a tank? Do go and take care of the other people.” An aide-de-camp was not a serious impediment to reflection, but at the moment Judith would have been distressed by the attendance of her own shadow, if it were too perceptible. Ancram crossed over to Rhoda, with his antipathy to the Lieutenant-Governor sensibly aggravated by the fact that his wife took an interest in him—an appreciative interest. It was out of harmony, Ancram felt vaguely, that she should do this—it jarred. He had so admired her usual attitude of pale, cool, sweet tolerance toward John Church—had so approved it. That attitude had been his solace in thinking about her in her unique position and with her rare temperament. To suppose her counting up her husband’s virtues, weighing them, doing justice to them, tinged her with the commonplace, and disturbed him. “That’s a curious thing,” he said to Rhoda. She let go her hold of the twig, and the red-and-gold flower danced up like a flame. “It belongs to the sun and the soil; so it pleases one better than any importation.” “An orchid is such a fairy—you can’t expect it to have a nationality,” he returned. She stood, with her head thrown back a little, looking at the sprays that swung above the line of her lips. Her wide-brimmed hat dropped a soft shadow over the upper part of her face; her eyes shone through it with a gleam of intensely feminine sweetness, and the tender curve of her throat gave him an unreasoned throb of anticipation. In six weeks he would be married to this slender creature; it would be an excursion into the unknown, not unaccompanied by adventures. Tentatively, it might be agreeable; it would certainly be interesting. He confessed to a curiosity which was well on the way to become impatient. “Then do you want to go and see the Dendrobium?” she asked. “Not if you prefer to do anything else.” “I think I would enjoy the cranes more, or the pink water-lilies. The others will understand, won’t they, that we two might like to take a little walk?”