Maude and Julia rose, and the little party strolled into the road at the end of the lane in the straggling order usual to people who walk for their own pleasure in a country village. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s white umbrella was a little way ahead of her companions, when Harcourt Lowther laid his gloved hand lightly upon Julia’s shoulder. She looked up at him, startled by the gesture. “You have had some reason to complain of your friend Miss Hillary and Francis Tredethlyn,” he said. “I am going to give you your revenge.” Julia stared in amazement at the speaker; but he did not wait to be interrogated. “Come, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” he said, “your papa will have to wait for his dinner, unless you walk a little faster.” He had not much reason to complain of Maude, who had been ahead of him until this moment, but he hurried her along the dusty road until, at a spot where it curved round to the river, he stopped suddenly, pointing to a cottage-garden, seen through the iron rails of a high old-fashioned gate set in a framework of clematis. “Look at that, Mrs. Tredethlyn! Isn’t it a pretty picture?” It was a little rustic _tableau_ composed of two figures grouped under a mulberry-tree,--a delicate-looking woman, with soft brown hair, touched here and there with a glimmer of gold, seated on a rustic bench. Her face was turned away from the road, and she was looking up at a man who leaned against the trunk of a tree. It was only a glimpse of this picture which Maude caught between the iron scroll-work of the gate, but she saw quite enough. The man was Francis Tredethlyn. “Great Heaven!” exclaimed Harcourt Lowther, in an audible whisper; “it _is_ Francis!” Maude looked at him with a vague alarm in her face, which had grown almost as white as the umbrella that sheltered it. Harcourt’s whisper had frightened her a hundredfold more than the sight of her husband, at home in that unknown garden with a woman she had never seen or heard of. “Who is that lady?” she asked, when they had passed the gate. “Do you know her, Mr. Lowther? You know all my husband’s associates much better than I do.” She tried to speak quite calmly, but failed miserably in the effort. Harcourt’s whisper had expressed so much. “No, I do not know the lady,” he answered, gravely. “I think you had better make no inquiries about her. Mr. Tredethlyn did not tell you that he was to spend the day at Petersham?” “No. He only said that he was going a little way out of town.” “Then in that case it will be better for you to leave him to finish his day as he pleases, since you have made no arrangement for meeting him here, and do not know the lady.”