‘My dearest Belle, if you and Jessie had paid me a visit on the banks of the Saskatchewan, I should have been unutterably happy, especially if you had brought me a monstrous hamper of provisions—a ham like that on the sideboard for instance, and a few trifles of that kind. I didn’t mean to depreciate Hillersdon; the hour and a half or so I spent at the breakfast table was positively delightful. But the worst of what people call the pleasures of the table is that other pleasures are apt to pall after them. Perhaps the best thing you could do would be to drive me gently about the park in your pony carriage till luncheon. I don’t suppose for a moment that I shall be able to eat any more at two o’clock; but the country air _might_ have a revivifying effect. One can but try.’ ‘You lazy creature! drive you indeed!’ exclaimed Jessie. ‘We’ll do nothing of the kind. But I tell you what you shall do if you like—and of course you will like—you shall be coxswain of our boat, and we’ll row you up to Dingley.’ ‘_You’ll_ row? Ah, I might have known those blue collars meant something rather desperate. However, steering a wherry isn’t wery hard labour, as the burlesque writers would say. I’ll come.’ The sisters were delighted. A good-looking cousin to damsels in a rural district is like water-brooks in a dry land. In their inmost hearts these girls doated on Geoffrey, but artfully suppressed all outward token of their affection. Many a night during the comfortable leisure of hairbrushing, when their joint maid had been dismissed, had the sisters speculated on their cousin’s life, wondering why he didn’t marry, and whom he would marry, and so on; while the real consideration paramount in the mind of each was, ‘Will he ever marry _me_?’ They strolled across the lawn (not a croquet lawn of a hundred and twenty feet square, after the manner of ‘grounds’ attached to suburban villas, but a wide undulating tract of greensward, shaded here and there by groups of picturesque old trees—maple and copper beech, and ancient hawthorns on which the berries were beginning to redden) to a Swiss boathouse with pointed gables and thatched roof, ample room for a small flotilla below, and a spacious apartment above—a room which, had young men been dominant in the household, would doubtless have been made a _tabagie_ or a billiard room, but which, under the gentler sway of young ladies, had been gaily decorated with light chintz draperies and fern cases, innocent-looking maple furniture, easels, piano, and workbaskets. That winding river reminded Geoffrey of the weedy ditch at Stillmington on which he had spent many a summer afternoon, pulling against the stream with disconsolate soul, thinking of his implacable divinity. He gave a little sigh, and wished himself back in Stillmington; to suffer, to hope, to despair—only to be near her. ‘I must make an end of this misery somehow,’ he said to himself, ‘or it will make an end of me.’