Many times, stung to the quick by the freezing contempt with which she treated his letters, he had watched and lain in wait for her, determined to force an interview, should the opportunity arise. But no such opportunity had yet arisen. He would do nothing to create a scandal. Here at Stillmington he had new hopes. The little town was almost empty, and offered a depressing prospect to the speculator who was to give the two concerts. The hunting season was over; the water-drinking and summer-holiday season had not yet begun. Stillmington had assumed its most exclusive aspect. The residents—a class who held themselves infinitely above those birds of passage who brought life and gaiety and a brisk circulation of ready money to the place—had it all to themselves. Respectable old Anglo-Indian colonels and majors paraded the sunny High-street, slow and solemn and gouty, and passed the time of day with their acquaintance on the opposite pavements in stentorian voices, which all the town might hear, and with as much confidence in the splendour of their social position as if they had been the ground-landlords of the town. Indeed, the lords of the soil were for the most part a very inferior race of men, who wore dusty coats, shabby hats with red-cotton handkerchiefs stuffed into the crown, and had a sprinkling of plaster of paris in their hair, and a three-foot rule sticking out of their breast pockets—men who belong to the bricklaying interest, and had come into Stillmington thirty years ago, footsore and penniless, in search of labour. These in their secret souls made light of the loud-voiced majors. The town was very quiet; the glades and groves in the subscription garden—where the young lilacs put forth their tender leaves in the spring sunshine, and the first of the nightingales began her plaintive jug-jug at eventide—were lonely as those pathless regions of brushwood at the mouth of the Mississippi where the alligator riots at large among his scaly tribe. To this garden came Geoffrey, on the second day of his residence at Stillmington. Mr. Shinn, the pianist, had dropped a few words that morning, which were all-sufficient to make this one spot the most attractive in the world for Geoffrey Hossack. Mrs. Bertram and her little girl had walked here yesterday afternoon. Mr. Shinn had seen them go in at the gate while he was enjoying a meditative cigar, and thinking out a reverie in C minor during his after-dinner stroll. Geoffrey was prompt to act upon this information. “What more likely than that his divinity would walk in the same place this afternoon? There was a blue sky, and the west wind was balmy as midsummer zephyrs. All nature invited her to those verdant groves.”