The young man’s face is pale, and the tears of intolerably wounded feeling glisten in his eyes. Lavinia listens in parted-lipped compassion, as so often before, for both the sinner and the sinned against. “I will be his ladder,” she says, in a key of quiet resolve, and so leaves the room. Half an hour later she returns. Her large eyelids are reddened, and her mouth twitching, but she is determinedly composed. “It is all right,” she says cheerfully. “We are to be married on May the 28th; and he cried and begged our pardon.” Thus it comes to pass that on this 23rd of April Lavinia is pacing in almost imminent bridehood--for what are five short weeks?--beside her future husband along a rustic road. They are taking a sweethearts’ ramble, like any other lad and lass. About them the charming garden of England swells and dips in gentle hills and long valleys and seaward-stretching plain. They have mounted the rise behind their house, and looked from the plough-land at the top towards the distant Sussex range. The cherry orchards still hold back their snowy secret, but the plum-blossom is whitening the brown trees; and he would be over-greedy for colour whom the dazzling grass and the generous larches and the sketchily greening thicket did not satisfy. Their path, leading down from the hill-crest, has brought them to an old-world farm, where with its team of four strong horses, that to a London eye, used to overloading and strain, would look so pleasantly up to their work, a waggon stands by a stack, from whose top men are pitching straw into it. On the grass in front of the house sheep crop and stare with their stupid wide-apart eyes, and hen-coops stand--lambs and chickens in friendliest relation. A lamb has two little yellow balls of fluff perched confidently, one on its woolly back, one on its forehead. Lavinia has seen it all a thousand times before; but to-day a new sense of turtle-winged content and thankful acquiescence in her destiny seems settling down upon her heart. The feeling translates itself into words. “It is very nice to have you back.” “It is very nice to be back,” replies her companion, with less than his usual point. Rupert has been in London, and returned only last night. His visits to the metropolis have to be conducted with caution and veiled in mystery, despite the innocency of his objects, owing to the profound contempt felt and--it need scarcely be added--expressed by his father for his tastes and occupation. Rupert has half a dozen graceful talents, which, if the roof of the house is not to be blown off, must be hidden under a pile of bushels. Sir George must be kept in ignorance that his last surviving son stoops to singing in a Madrigal Society, draws clever caricatures of Tory statesmen for a weekly, and writes brilliant little leaders for a new Liberal daily paper.