‘This is better than all the tigered orchids in Lady Baker’s collection,’ he mused, as he perched himself on a stile and took out his cigar-case for a quiet smoke. ‘Why do great ladies cultivate lady’s-slippers and pitcher-plants when for less money they might surround themselves with model villages and happy peasantry? Has the rôle of Lady Bountiful gone quite out of fashion, I wonder?’ He lighted his cigar and meditated upon life in general, dreamily contemplating the cottages and wondering about their inmates, as he had often wondered about the inhabitants of the dull old houses in the dull old country towns. These cottages seemed above the ordinary level, cleaner, brighter, more prosperous-looking. He could not fancy wife-beating or any other iniquity going on within those homely plastered walls. Those twinkling diamond-paned lattices seemed transparent as a good man’s conscience, and in most of these dwellings the outer door stood wide open, as if the inmates invited inspection. He could see an eight-day clock, a dresser decked with many-coloured crockeryware, a little round table spread for tea, a cradle, a snug arm-chair, a wicker birdcage, a row of geranium pots—all the furniture of home. He felt that he had alighted upon a small Arcadia. While he sat thus musing, slowly smoking, very loth to go back to the civilised world, pert country cousins, and tableaux vivants, and tepid ices, and classical music, and general inanity, the door of that solitary cottage whose interior did not invite inspection was suddenly opened, and a child came skipping out—a child who wore a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat, with long yellow tresses streaming beneath it, and a pretty holland pinafore, and displayed symmetrical legs clad in blue stockings—a child after the order of Mr. Millais. Geoffrey made as if he would have fallen off the stile; the half-smoked cigar fell from his hand. For a few moments he sat transfixed and statue-like, and could only stare. Then, with a sudden rush, he darted across the little strip of green, and clasped this butterfly child in his arms. ‘Why, it’s my little Flossie!’ he cried rapturously, smothering the small face with kisses, which the little maiden received without a murmur. Had not Mr. Hossack endeared himself to her by all the arts of bribery and corruption, in the shape of costly French bonbons, _éditions de luxe_ of popular fairy tales and German hobgoblin stories, and mechanical white mice that ran across the floor, and mechanical mail-coaches that, on being wound up, rushed off at breakneck speed to nowhere in particular, and came to grief after a few headlong journeys? ‘It’s my precious little Flossie! My darling, where’s mamma?’ ‘Mamma, mamma!’ screamed the child, looking back towards the cottage. ‘Come out and see who’s come.’ And then, turning to Geoffrey again, she said with childhood’s candid selfishness, ‘Have you brought me some more French bonbons in a box with a picture on the lid, like the last?’