Cosmo’s first visit had been at Christmas, when all was new to him, and when the revelation of the two girls at Mount, so full of life and movement amid the gentle stagnation of the parish, had been the most delightful surprise to the resigned visitor, who had come as a matter of duty, determined to endure anything, and make himself agreeable to Charley’s friends. ‘You never told me what sort of neighbours you had,’ he had said almost with indignation. ‘Neighbours! I told you about the Mountfords and the Woodheads, and Lord Meadowlands, who is our great gun,’ said Charley tranquilly. ‘You speak as if they were all the same--Mountfords and Woodheads and Smiths and Jones--whereas Miss Mountford would be remarked in any society,’ Douglas had said. He remembered afterwards that Charley had looked at him for a moment before he replied, and had grown red; but all he had said was, ‘I didn’t know that you thought much about girls.’ All this passed through Douglas’s mind as he stood looking after the two brothers, watching the mournfulness of their march with an irrepressible sense of the ludicrous. To see that victim of fate leaning on his brother’s arm, dropping now and then a melancholy word or deep-heaved sigh, and walking gloomily, as after a funeral, to the afternoon ‘game,’ was a sight at which the most sympathetic looker-on might have been excused for smiling. ‘I didn’t know that you thought much about girls!’ Was there ever a more stupid remark? And how was I to know _he_ thought much about girls? Douglas asked himself with another laugh. His conscience was easily satisfied on this point. And he had come down at the beginning of the long vacation to see a little more of the Ashleys’ neighbours. He could not but feel that it must be a relief to them also to see a conversible being, an alive and awake human creature amidst those scenes of rural life. But now how far things had gone! Douglas had been a month at the Rectory, and as his eyes followed the two Ashleys along the white sun-swept road and away under the shadow of the park trees, the idea came to him, with a curious sense of expansive and enlarged being, that the masses of foliage sweeping away towards the west, amid which the two solemn wayfarers soon disappeared, would one day, in all probability, be his own. ‘No, by the bye, not that; that’s the entailed part,’ he said to himself; then laughed again, this time partly in gentle self-ridicule, partly in pleasure, and turned his face the other way, towards Lower Lilford--for he had made himself master of the whole particulars. Facing this way, and with the laugh still on his lips, he suddenly found himself in the presence of the Rector, who had come out by his own study window at the sight of the solitary figure on the lawn. Douglas felt himself taken in the act--though of what it would have been hard to say. He grew red in spite of himself under the gaze of the Rector’s mild and dull eyes.