They were dining at a table set in the oriel window facing on the garden. The table was lit by candles in branched silver candlesticks. On a heavy buffet by the door from the kitchens and buttery, under the gallery and on serving tables, were other candles. There were perhaps a dozen in all, and they gave what light was necessary, but left the high-pitched, raftered roof just a-glimmer, and parts of the hall in shadow. The portraits that hung above the dark wainscoting were dimly seen, the gilded carving of the gallery and the screen beneath it glowed softly where the candles shone upon it, and faded into rich dimness beyond the circle of light. Viola! She would love this old hall, and all the other stately rooms of the ancient house. He had never thought of it, except very vaguely, as belonging to him, but he thought of himself now as belonging to it. He would like her to admire anything that had to do with him, and he would like her to share his admiration. But such thoughts as these were a very small part of what was rioting through his mind. His chief feeling about his immediate surroundings was one of strangeness that he should be sitting there quietly dining and talking upon unimportant matters which had nothing to do with Viola. It was to connect her with them that he took notice of them at all, and he looked out more often into the still starlit garden, because it was under the sky that he had met her and talked to her, and her alliance with the things of nature that he loved was already fixed and established. All beautiful aspects of the world, and of the fair places in his own world, connected themselves naturally with her. She filled every corner of his mind, and to whatever source of familiar delight he turned she seemed to be there before him. After dinner, on summer nights, Harry often walked in the garden with his mother. Lady Brent never went out, but sat with her book in the drawing-room. Wilbraham spent half an hour in the library, smoking and reading, and then came into the drawing-room to play the piano or to talk until they went to bed at ten o’clock. When they heard the first notes of the piano, Harry and his mother would go indoors. If they lingered, Lady Brent would send Wilbraham out for them, on the plea of the night air being dangerous, or, if the night was so warm that that seemed too absurd, of its being time for Harry to go to bed. She did not like these garden confabulations between mother and son, but never showed it except by confining them thus to the half-hour after dinner.