Geoffrey soon found himself on the friendliest terms with the mistress of Mardenholme. Lady Baker liked good-looking young men who had no unpleasant consciousness of their good looks, and liked the modern easy manner of youth, provided the ease never degenerated into insolence. She took Geoffrey under her wing immediately, walked nearly a mile with him under the midday sun, protected by a huge, white silk umbrella, to show him the lions of Mardenholme; that profound hypocrite, Mr. Hossack, affecting an ardent admiration of ferneries and flower beds, in the hope that this perambulatory exhibition might presently procure him the opportunity for which his soul languished. ‘Let me once find myself alone with this nice old party,’ he said to himself, ‘and I won’t let the chance slip. She shall tell me all she knows about the villain who wronged Janet Davoren.’ To his infinite vexation, however, his cousins, who worshipped the mistress of Mardenholme, followed close upon her footsteps throughout the exposition, went into raptures with every novelty among the ferny tribes, and made themselves altogether a nuisance. Geoffrey was beginning to struggle with dreary yawns when the Mardenholme luncheon gong relieved the situation. ‘And now that I’ve shown you my latest acquisition, let us go to luncheon,’ said Lady Baker, who was never happier than when feeding a new acquaintance. In fact, she liked her friends very much as she liked her orchids and ferns—for the sake of their novelty. Nobody ever refused an invitation from Lady Baker. It was almost the same thing as a royal command. Jessie and Belle murmured something about ‘papa,’ and the voice of duty which called them back to Hillersdon. But Lady Baker waived the objection with that regal air of hers, which implied that any one else’s inconvenience was a question of smallest moment when her pleasure was at stake. ‘I should be positively unhappy if you went away,’ she said; ‘I have only that Mr. and Mrs. Wimple, whom you just now saw in the garden house. This is their first visit since their honeymoon, and their exhibition of mutual affection is almost unendurable. But as it is a match of my own making I am obliged to tolerate the infliction. They are my only visitors until to-morrow. So if you don’t stop, I shall be bored to death between this and dinner. I actually caught that absurd child, Florence Wimple, in the very act of spelling “YOU DARLING” in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet to that simpleton of a husband of hers across the breakfast table this morning.’ Moved by this melancholy picture, Jessie and Belle consented to remain. Geoffrey had meant to stay from the outset. Indeed, he had landed on the greensward of Mardenholme determined to attain his object before he left. CHAPTER III. LADY BAKER TELLS THE STORY OF THE PAST.