“Of course,” he assented with a laugh. “I never thought of that. Yes, to be sure; you are the daughter of a farmer and her sire is an earl. Her grandfather was a working navvy, and no human being knows who his father was. Your grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-great-grand-grand-grandfather was a Wad-hurst of Athalsdean on back to the time of William the Conqueror, a noted robber who flourished in the year ten hundred and something, and brought over a crowd of gaolbirds to England to turn out the Saxons. They didn’t turn out the Wadhurst of the time, and so here you are moving in a different sphere from Lady Cynthia. And that brings us up to the present moment. Now maybe you’ll tell me in what particular sphere you’ve been moving since I saw you last. That’s ten days ago. I hoped to have the chance of coming across you at some place.” “I have not been very far beyond the boundaries of the farm,” she said. “I have been fully occupied. You see, I’m very fond of two things--music and milk, and both are absorbing all my time.” “I could understand music absorbing you, but surely it’s you who absorb the milk, if you like it,” said he. “It wasn’t that sort of absorption,” she said. “No one knows anything about milk by drinking it.” “And what on earth do you do with it?” “Test it--analyse it; so that at a moment’s notice you can say what it is.” “It’s never anything but milk, is it--before it’s wheeled off to the railway stations and sent up to the retailers who mix it with things--water and boracic acid?” “That’s the haphazard way in which a dairy was run until recently. My father used actually to run his on the same want of principle. It was I who got the laboratory built, and now he works it on a proper system. We got rid of over fifty cows in a fortnight--some of them were believed by the dairy manager to be the best on the farm. It was only after a number of tests that I found out that their milk contained only the most miserable proportion of the true component parts of good milk.” “And was it worth your while, may I ask?” She looked at him in surprise. “Worth our while? Why, the milk question is the most important that exists in England or anywhere else at the present moment. It is not going too far to say that the whole future of England depends upon the milk consumed by the people. Milk is the most marvellous thing in the world. It seems to me that it should be given a place in Nature all to itself. There is nothing so marvellous as milk, believe me.” “It’s not so popular as beer in most localities. But now that I come to think of it, I fancy that you are right about it. It certainly is worth your while keeping your eye on it.” “Oh, everything is worth one’s while if one does it properly.” “Everything--except farming, it would appear. Dunning, my agent, has a very bad account to give of our farms--three of them without tenants--the largest has had no tenant for over three years. That’s not encouraging.”