He was wonderfully good-looking, and of a thoroughly manly type of beauty. Tall, as I have said, but firm and compact, the features almost perfect of their kind, and the colouring unusually rich and mellow, if such a word can be applied to a human face. The hair was of that bright, sunny hue, on which, however in the shade, some light always seems to linger; the eyes unmistakeably blue, honest, laughing, what I have heard called “well opened eyes,” set round by thick, soft fringes, curling like a girl’s. A pleasant mouth too, lips closed in repose, though usually open enough to show the clear, even, white teeth within. But nothing in the mouth or lower jaw to spoil the beautiful whole, as is not unfrequently the case in such great physical perfection, by its confession of spiritual weakness, undue preponderance of the lower part of our nature over the higher. No, if Geoffrey Baldwin’s mouth told tales at all, they were of too great sensitiveness, too quick a sympathy, too impulsive a heart, to be altogether well managed and directed by the intellectual powers with which nature had gifted him. For although of average ability and intelligence, he was certainly not a clever man, in the ordinary sense of the word. “An illiterate clod-hopper,” he called himself, but that was far too severe. Feel deeply, very deeply, he could, and often, perhaps on the whole too often, did. But as for thinking deeply! It made his head ache, he said, and after all what was the good of it? He knew well and thoroughly all required of him in his daily life, which was that of a gentleman farmer, and so long as that was the case, he couldn’t for the life of him see what more learning he wanted. But honest as the day, brave as a lion, and tender as a lamb, chivalrous, with a chivalry that is fast going out of fashion, generous and unsuspicious to a fault—though he went to sleep over Tennyson, and preferred a ride across country to the most exquisite music ever heard—after all, the world would not be the worse of a few more like you, Geoffrey Baldwin. Then they talked a little of old days, and Geoffrey blushed more than Marion, when some of their escapades were referred to—their tumbling into the brook and his fishing them out; their “hare and hounds,” when the hare, and she, perched on Geoffrey’s shoulder, the terrible horseman pursuit. And another remembrance came to Geoffrey’s mind, though this he kept to himself. Of a day when, in return for some special act of kindness, little May had clambered on to his knee and kissed and bugged him right honestly, while she promised, voluntarily too, that if only “Jeff” would wait till she was big she would marry him, she would indeed, really and truly, or “in truality,” which was her childish mode of asseveration. “What a little tomboy I must have been,” said Marion, and then she added dreamily, “I wonder if I shall ever see that Brackley cottage again!”