For Ned the house was big enough; to him its grounds presented a retreat that had all the melancholy charm of a cloister to its monks. Nameless antiquity dreamed in its clumps of mossy ruins; in its fragment of a Norman gateway; in its tumbled “Wodehouse” men--sightless, crippled giants, with clubs shattered against the skull of Time; in its wolfish gurgoyles snarling up from the grass. Hereabouts could he wander a summer’s day and never regret the world. Not often was he to be seen in the old town hard by; yet from time to time he would walk over on a sunny day and loiter away an hour or so in its venerable streets. And therein one morning (it was breathing kind July weather) he saw a vision that seemed to typify to him the very “sweet seventeen” of the year. Now Ned’s knowledge of women had been mostly of the emotional side; and a certain constitutional causticity in him had been wrought out of all patience by the attentions to which he had been subjected in the respect of one order of passion. It is true his innate sense of humour rejected for himself the plea of excessive attractiveness, and, indeed, any explanation of the pursuit, save that he had happened coincidently into the scent-area of a couple of questing creatures of prey. Still, built as he was, the experience was so far to his distaste as to incline him always a little thenceforth to an unreasonable hatred of the dulcetly sentimental in, and, indeed, to a shyness of, the sex altogether. Upon this, however, the little July-winged vision--which blossomed into his sight as he turned the corner into a quiet street--he looked with that inspired _premier coup d’œil_ that aurelians direct to a rare living “specimen” of what they have hitherto only known in unapproachable cabinets. He looked, and saw her spotless, as recently emerged from some horny chrysalis of his own late incubating fancy. (“This is _ipsa quæ_, the which--there is none but only she.”) He looked, and the desire of acquisition gripped his heart--if only he had had a net in his hand! She had bright brown hair and china-blue eyes, and her hair curled very daintily, and her eyelashes dropped little butterfly kisses--as the children call them--on her own pretty cheeks. She was of an appealing expression, a thought coy and _spirituelle_; and she was indescribably French, too, in her tricks of gesture and the very roguish tilt of her hat. That was by the way to this travelled Cymon. Emigrants nowadays were commoner than sign-boards in the streets of Bury. What concerned him was that the girl appeared to be in trouble. She rested one hand on the sill of a low window in the wall; her forehead had a pained line in it; she sucked in her lower lip as if something hurt her; from time to time an extraordinary little spasm seemed to waver up her frame.