‘We’re not afraid of that,’ answered Belle, who was much more disturbed by the idea that this free-and-easy young man might forget the homage due to a county magnate such as Lady Baker—a personage who in a manner made the rain or fine weather in this part of Hampshire. A summer which her ladyship did not spend at Mardenholme was regarded as a bad and profitless season. People almost wondered that the harvest was not backward, that the clover and vetches came up pretty much the same as usual. CHAPTER II. LADY BAKER. It was hardly one o’clock when they beheld the terraced gardens of Mardenholme; gardens that were worth a day’s journey to see; a thoroughly Italian picture, set in a thoroughly English landscape; marble balustrades surmounting banks of flowers; tall spire-shaped conifers ranged at intervals, tier above tier; marble steps and marble basins, in every direction; and below this show-garden, sloping down to the river, a lawn of softest verdure, bordered by vast shrubberies, that to the stranger seemed pathless, yet where a fallen leaf could hardly have been found, so exquisite was the order of the grounds. Geoffrey tied his boat to the lower branch of a mighty willow which dipped its green tresses in the stream, leaped out and landed his cousins as coolly as if he had arrived at an hotel. No mortal was to be seen for the first moment, but Jessie’s sharp eyes beheld a white shirt-sleeve gleaming athwart a group of magnolias. ‘There’s a gardener over there,’ she said: ‘we’d better ask him if Lady Baker is in the grounds.’ They made for the gardener, who, with the slow and philosophic air of a man whose wages are not dependent on the amount of his labour, was decapitating daisies that had been impertinent enough to lift their vulgar heads in this patrician domain. This hireling informed them that he had seen her ladyship somewheres about not ten minutes agone. She was in the Chaney temple, perhaps, and he volunteered to show them the way. ‘You needn’t trouble yourself,’ said Jessie. ‘I know the way.’ ‘What does he mean by the Chaney temple?’ asked Geoffrey, as they departed. ‘It is a garden-house Lady Baker has had sent over from China,’ answered Belle. ‘I know she’s fond of sitting there.’ They entered a darksome alley in the shrubbery, which wound along the river-bank some little way, opening into a kind of wilderness; a very tame wilderness, inhabited by water-fowl of various tribes, which stretched out their necks and screamed vindictively at the intruders. Here on the brink of the river was the garden-house, an edifice of bamboo and lattice-work, adorned with bells, very much open to all the winds of heaven, but a pleasant shelter on a sultry day in August. When the breeze shook them, the numerous bells rang ever so faintly, and the sound woke echoes on the farther bank of the stream. Lady Baker was reclining in a bamboo-chair, reading, with a young lady and gentleman, and a Japanese pug in attendance upon her.