Mr. Hossack paid his money at the little gate, where a comfortable-looking gatekeeper was dozing over a local newspaper, and went in. Nature had liberally assisted the landscape gardener who laid out the Stillmington Eden. Geoffrey followed a path which wound gently through a shady grove, athwart whose undergrowth of rhododendron and laurel flashed the bright winding river. Here and there a break in the timber revealed a patch of green lawn sloping to the bank, where willows dipped their tremulous leafage into the rippling water. Ferns, and such pale flowers as will flourish in the shade—primrose, wild hyacinth, and periwinkle—grew luxuriantly upon the broken ground beside the path, where art had concealed itself beneath an appearance of wildness. To the right of this grove there was a wide stretch of lawn, where the toxophilites held their festivals—where the croquet balls went perpetually on certain days of the week, from the first of May to the last of September. But happily the croquet season had not yet begun, and the birds had grove and lawn to themselves. Geoffrey went to the end of the grove, meeting no one. He strolled down to the bank and looked at the river, contemplated the weeds with the eye of boatman and of angler. ‘It ought to be a good place for jack,’ he muttered, yawned, and went back to the grove. It was lonely as before. Thrushes, linnets, blackbirds, burst forth with their little gushes of melody, now alone, now together, then lapsed into silence. He could hear the fish leap in the river; he could hear the faint splash of the willow branches shaken by the soft west wind. He yawned again, walked back to within a few yards of the gate, came back again, stretched himself, looked at his watch, and sank exhausted on a rustic seat under the leafy arm of a chestnut. ‘I wonder if she will come to-day,’ he thought, wishing he had been at liberty to solace himself with a cigar. ‘It would be just like my luck if she didn’t. If I had only seen her yesterday instead of that ass Shinn, with his confounded reverie in C minor. But there was I loafing at the other end of the town, expecting to find her looking at the shop-windows, or getting a novel at the circulating library, when I ought to have been down here. And if I ever do contrive to speak to her, I wonder what she’ll say. Treat me with contumely, no doubt; blight me with her scorn, as she has blighted my epistolary efforts. And yet, sometimes, I have seen a look in those gray eyes that seemed to say, “What, are you so true? Would to God I could reward your truth!” A delusion, of course—mad as my love for her.’