"I hope you don't mean to disparage your garden at Beechhurst. Our gardener is always complaining of the old age of all things here. Everything is worn out. The trees, the shrubs, the frames, the greenhouse. One ought to begin again from the very beginning, he says. He would be charmed with Beechhurst, where all things are so neat and trim." "Cockney trimness, I'm afraid; but if you are satisfied with it, if you think it not altogether a bad garden----" "I think it a delightful garden," said Suzette, blushing at that word "satisfied," which implied so much. "I am glad of that," said Allan, with a deep sigh of content, as if some solemn question had been settled. "And you like my mother?" "Very much indeed. But how you skip from the garden to Lady Emily!" "And you approve of the Mandarin-room?" "It is one of the handsomest rooms I ever saw, except in an Indian palace." "Then take them, Suzette," he cried eagerly, with his arm round her waist, drawing the slim figure to his breast, holding and dominating her by force of will and strength of arm, smiling down at her with adoring eyes. "Have them, dearest! Mother, garden, room--they are all your own; for they belong to your very slave. They are at your feet, as I am." "Do you call this being at my feet?" she asked, setting herself suddenly free, with a joyous laugh. "You have a very impertinent way of offering your gifts." "Not impertinent--only desperate. I remembered my repulse of the other day, and I swore to myself that I would hold you in my arms--once, at least, if only once, even if you were to banish me into outer darkness the next moment--and I have done it, and I am glad! But you won't banish me, will you, Suzette? You must needs know how I love you--how long and patiently I have loved you----" "Long! patiently! Why, we only met at Midsummer." "Ah, consider the age that every day on which I did not see you has seemed to me, and the time would hardly come within your powers of computation. Suzette, be merciful! say you love me, were it ever so little. Were it only a love like a grain of mustard-seed, I know it would grow into a wide and spreading tree by-and-by, and all the days of my life would be happy under its shelter." "You would think me curiously inconsistent if I owned to loving you after what I said the other day," faltered Suzette, looking down at the flowers. "I should think you adorable." She was only serious for a moment, and then her natural gaiety prevailed. "Do you know that my aunt lectured me severely when I confessed to having refused your flattering offer?" "Did she really? How sweet of her! After that, you cannot refuse me again. Your aunt would shut you up and feed you upon bread and water, as fathers and mothers used to do with rebellious daughters in the eighteenth century." "I hardly think she would treat me quite so ferociously for saying 'No;' but I think she would be pleased if I were to say 'Yes.'"