They all went down stairs together, Theodore leading the way with his cousin, talking gaily as they went down the wide oak staircase, between sober panelled walls of darkest brown. The front part of the ground floor was given up to offices, and the dining-room was built out at the back, a large bright-looking room with a bay window, opening on to a square town garden, a garden of about half an acre, surrounded with high walls, above which showed the treetops in one of the leafy walks that skirt the town. It was very different to that Italian garden at Cheriton, where the peacocks strutted slowly between long rows of cypresses, where the Italian statues showed white in every angle of the dense green wall, and where the fountain rose and fell with a silvery cadence in the still summer atmosphere. Here there was only a square lawn, just big enough for a tennis court, and a broad border of hardy flowers, with one especial portion at the end of the garden, where Sophia experimented in cross fertilization after the manner of Darwin, seeming for ever upon the threshold of valuable discoveries. Mr. Dalbrook was a fine-looking man of some unascertained age between fifty and sixty. He boasted that he was Lord Cheriton’s junior by a year or two, although they had both come to a time of life when a year or two more or less could matter very little. He was very fond of Juanita, and he welcomed her with especial tenderness in her new character as a bride. He kissed her, and then held her away from him for a minute, with a kindly scrutiny. “Lady Godfrey surpasses Miss Dalbrook,” he said, smiling at the girl’s radiant face. “I suppose now you are going to be the leading personage in our part of the county. We quiet townspeople will be continually hearing of you, and there will not be a local paper without a notice of your doings. Anyhow, I am glad you don’t forget old friends.” He placed her beside him at the large oval table, on which the handsomest plate and the eldest china had been set forth with a celerity which testified to Brown’s devotion. Mr. Dalbrook was one of those sensible people who never waste keep or wages upon a bad horse or a bad servant, whereby his cook was one of the best in Dorchester; so the luncheon, albeit plain and unpretentious, was a meal of which no man need feel ashamed.