‘Dear Lady Baker,’ cried Belle, anxious to make the best of her unceremonious approach, ‘I hope you won’t think it very dreadful of us to come into the gardens this way like burglars; but my cousin Geoffrey was so anxious to be presented to you, that he insisted on rowing us here this morning.’ ‘I do think it extremely dreadful,’ replied the lady with a pleasant laugh. ‘And so this is the cousin of whom I have heard so much. Welcome to Mardenholme, Mr. Hossack. We ought to have known each other long before this, since we are such near neighbours.’ ‘I have the honour to possess a small estate not far from your ladyship’s,’ answered Geoffrey; ‘but, being hitherto unacquainted with the chief attraction of the neighbourhood in your person, I have ignorantly given a lease of my place to a retired sugar-broker.’ ‘That’s a pity, for I think we should have been good neighbours. Mr. Hossack, Mrs. Wimple; Mr. Wimple, Mr. Hossack,’ murmured Lady Baker in a parenthesis; at which introduction the young lady and the young gentleman, newly married, and indifferent to the external world, honoured Geoffrey with distant bows, and immediately withdrew to a trellised balcony overhanging the river, to gaze upon that limpid stream, or, in Geoffrey’s modern vocabulary, ‘to spoon.’ ‘You are a wonderful traveller, I understand,’ continued her ladyship. ‘Hardly, in the modern sense of the word,’ said Geoffrey, with becoming modesty. ‘I have hunted the bighorn on the Rocky Mountains, and shot grouse in Norway; but I have neither discovered the source of a river, nor found an unknown waterfall; in short, as a traveller, I am a very insignificant individual. But as a rule I keep moving, locomotion being about the only employment open to a man to whom Providence has denied either talent or ambition.’ ‘You are at any rate more modest than the generality of lions, Mr. Hossack,’ Lady Baker replied graciously.