"I am not so impressionable. The things are wanted in October, and July and August are quite late enough for getting them ready." "I subscribe to these institutions," Mrs. Roebuck remarked languidly. "I never work for them. Life isn't long enough." "Then you never have the right kind of feeling about your poorer fellow-creatures," said Mrs. Mornington. "It is the doing something for them, using one's own hand and eye and thought for the poor toiling creatures, sacrificing some little leisure and some little fad to making them more comfortable--it is that kind of thing which brings the idea of that harder world home to one." "Ah, how nice it is of you dear ladies to sacrifice yourselves like that; but you couldn't do it after a June and July in London. If you had seen what a poor creature I looked when we took our seats in the club train for Homburg----" Mrs. Mornington tucked her arm under Lady Emily's and walked her away. "I want you to tell me all about your farm," she said. And then, in a rather loud aside, "I can't stand that woman, and I wish your son hadn't been so conscientious in asking her." While emptiness and ennui prevailed on the terrace in front of the Mandarin-room, there were a pair of wanderers in the shrubbery, whose talk was unleavened by worldliness or pretence of any kind. Allan had stolen away from the smokers in the dining-room, and was escorting Suzette and her friend Bessie Edgefield round his modest domain--the shrubberies, the paddocks nearest the house, which had been planted and educated into a kind of park; the greenhouse and hothouse, which were just capacious enough to supply plenty of flowers for drawing-room and dinner-table, but not to grow grapes or peaches. Everything was on a modest, unassuming scale. Allan felt that after the mansion and gardens at Discombe, his house suggested the abode of a retired shopkeeper. A successful hosier or bootmaker might create for himself such a home. Wholesale trade, soap, or lucifer matches, or cocoa would require something far more splendid. Modest as the place was, the two girls admired, or seemed to admire, all its details--the conifers of thirty years' growth, the smiling meadows, the fawn-coloured cows. A sunny September afternoon showed those fertile pastures and trim gardens at their best. Allan felt exquisitely happy walking about those smooth lawns and gravel paths with the girl he loved. At every word of approval he fancied she was praising the place in which she would be content to live. After that avowal of his the other day, it seemed to him that her kindness meant much more than it had meant before she knew her power. She could not be so cruel as to mock him with the promise of her smiles, her sweet words, her undisguised pleasure in his company. Yes, he was perfectly happy. He thought of her refusal the other day as only the prelude to her acceptance. She had not said "No;" she had only said "Not yet."