But there is the voice of our host greeting them from the porch below, and the Professor comes forward eagerly to shake hands with him. Young Rossdhu has driven down to say that some friends arrived at their house last night, and his mother will be glad if we can go up to tennis and luncheon there this morning. No other engagement will be broken by this, and a day on that velvet lawn among the pine-woods will be delightful; so the carriage has been ordered for eleven o’clock. The day promises to be very warm here by the sea, but more air will perhaps be moving up among the hills, and there will always be the shadow of the old beeches to rest under. When breakfast is over, then, it will just be time to get ready, though it is tempting to linger in the quiet cool little room, at the white-spread table with its freshness of flowers--the full-blowing Maréchal Niel and the languorous yellow tea-roses set there by dainty fingers. Outside, the sunshine is very hot already, and the last dewdrop has long ago dried from the scarlet petals of the geraniums in the urns. The ponies at the door, too, are impatiently whisking their tails and twitching their ears to keep off the flies. There could be no more enjoyable drive than that along this road of the far North, running a mile or two first within sight of the blue glistening sea, and then turning inland. The road itself, of that dazzling sandy whiteness peculiar to the district, is perfectly dry and smooth; and while from the deep grasses of the bank on each side, and from the warren beyond, come the hot passion-breath of the golden-flowered whin, and the soft amorous sigh of the milky-clouded thorn, there is ever in sight the broad country, rich in old forests, showing here and there the grey tower of some ancient castle, and stretching away to the mountains beyond, purple under the speckless sky. Then it turns off suddenly into the pine-woods of Rossdhu, and the wheels roll noiseless upon the soft bed of fir needles. Forty years ago, when old Rossdhu found that, owing to the repeal of the Corn Laws, it would no longer be profitable to grow wheat, like many another proprietor in the North he planted his lands with trees. And so, while the country buys its bread with the riches of ore and fossil stored up æons ago in Nature’s grim treasure-caverns underground, the soil, at rest from plough and harrow, is growing young again amid the forests, under the brown depth of mouldering leaf and cone.