Life possible!--it is a hooded anonymous thing, that she dare not interrogate. In its presence her thoughts draw in their antennæ, like a sea-creature’s suddenly touched. She starts away from the little woodland garden, and walks hurriedly on, down a rough cart-track, rutty and caked with the winter’s dried mud. Foolish extravagant analogies and comparisons dart through her brain--not only dart, but tarry and pitch tents there. Her life has been like this parched wintry road--a dull track for heavy-wheeled days to grind and plough along; now it has turned suddenly into a blossoming brake. Her eyes lift themselves in a frightened rapture to where the descending sun’s beams thread with evening light the lovely thin green of the birches, exquisitely breaking and shaming the tardier chestnuts. “It is the spring!” she says to herself. “It has always made me feel drunk!” But the long vista of branches, all brownly, redly, greenly bursting, with opulent variety of ideas, ahead of her, tells her that she lies. * * * * * Sir George is on the look out for her when she reaches home, and the sight of his familiar figure, coupled with a remorseful fear of having been wanted and not been within reach--an almost unparalleled occurrence in her history--pulls her down to fact and earth again, without a moment’s delay. Yet a single glance at her uncle’s face tells her that, despite her truancy, she finds him in the best possible of humours. “And where have you been gadding, miss?” he asks, in a tone that reveals the highest complacency of which one so habitually gloomy is capable. “I thought you were busy with Mr. Ingram,” she answers, involuntarily shirking the question. “And so we have been,” returns he, his sombre face breaking into a smile; “both Rupert and I! And very glad you ought to be that we have.” “Ought I?” “I was determined that you should have no excuse for wishing to hurry me off,” continues Sir George, with rather acrid pleasantry, that has yet every intention of being agreeable. “After all, what do I want?--a crust and a glass of Marsala, an armchair and a pipe. So I have made over the whole of his mother’s money to Rupert, and he has settled every penny of it on you and your children.” For a moment or two Lavinia is quite silent. Possibly surprise at her uncle’s flight of imagination in the matter of the exiguity of his own needs; possibly also choking gratitude; and possibly, again, the sudden confrontation with the younger children, whom she had thought to have buried in the wood, keep her dumb. “You are very good to me,” she answers at last, in a tone which sounds to herself the _ne plus ultra_ of thankless flatness; but in which her hearer happily recognizes only an acknowledgment, faltering from the excess of its obligation.