“Heaven knows, I’m ready to believe anything! And I thought I should never drag down my lofty intelligence to such deeps. But, Leslie, my dear, I am getting----” He paused for a word. “Convinced?” “Not exactly convinced, but shaken in my obstinacy. I’ve become a doubter of my own scepticism, and that’s the worst mental condition a man can reach--or almost the worst,” he added. “Does Harry know you are a convert?” Her fine eyes twinkled with mischief. “He suspects me,” said Dick gloomily. “If I thought the money was here----” She regarded him steadily. “Would it make a big difference to you, Dick?” she asked. “Me personally?” He shook his head. “Lord, no! It would make a difference to the----” He paused. “To Harry. I was going to say the estate. The estate, to me, is something distinct from any personality. It stands for the agglomeration of dead men’s efforts, the cumulative sum of all their strivings.” She looked at him for a long time in wonder. She loved him in this serious mood of his. “You’ve made rather a fetish of Fossaway Manor and the Chelford estates, haven’t you?” “Have I?” He was genuinely surprised. “I wonder…” And then he laughed. “It isn’t a bad line for a second son to exalt the estates to which he will never succeed, above the personality of the man who will get it! It makes him rather superior to the real heir. Put my fetish worship down to vanity, for the Lord knows I have my share of that.” “I doubt it,” she said quietly. “Come out on to the terrace. Your flowers are lovely.” “‘Everything in the garden----’” he began, but she checked him with a warning finger. “If you get banal I shall go in and find Puttler.” XXV She leaned on the gray stone balustrade and looked down upon the wind-stirred tresses of great golden chrysanthemums, each as big as a large-sized saucer. They were not all gold; there were deep red blooms and snowy white and flaming orange, and beyond them a huge bed of late-flowering roses; even from this distance, she could catch the delicate fragrance of them. “It’s a beautiful old place,” she said in a hushed voice. “I don’t wonder that you love it. How long has your family owned this estate, Dick?” “Eight hundred years,” he said. “The first of the Chelfords sliced off the head of the original owner and stole the property. Successive generations of Chelfords, whose own heads were cut off with monotonous regularity, enclosed a few thousand acres of common land belonging to the people--and there you are!” She laughed softly. “You have very few illusions, have you?” “None,” was his curt reply, and somehow the answer hurt her. They had to send twice for Harry before he put in an appearance, and he seemed disappointed to find that Puttler was not there.