He wrote a note to Ruggles, saying that he would be back late and not to wait for him, and set out in his own car for Blankshire, where the duchess was to meet him at Stainer Court at noon. On his way out he decided that he had been a fool to discuss Letty Lane with the Duchess of Breakwater, and that it had been none of his business to put her duty before her, and that he had judged her quickly and unfairly. He fell in love with the lovely English country over which his motor took him, and it made him more affectionate toward the English woman. He sat back in his car, looking over the fine shooting land, the misty golden forests, as through the misty country his motor took its way. The breath of England was on his cheeks, he breathed in its odors fresh and sweet, the windless air was cool and fragrant. His cheeks grew red, his eyes shone like stars, and he was content with his youth and his lot. When they stopped at Castelene, the property belonging to Stainer Court, he felt something of proprietorship stir in him, and at Stainer Arms ordered a drink, bought petroleum, and then pushed up the avenue under the leafless giant trees, whose roots were older than his father’s name or than any state of the Union. And he felt admiration and something like emotion as he saw the first towers of Stainer Court finally appear. The duchess waited for him in the room known as the “Green Knight’s Room,” because of a figure in tapestry on the walls. The legend in wool had been woven in Spain, somewhere about the time when Isabella was kind, and when in turn a continent loomed up for the world in general out of the mist. The subject of the Green Knight’s tapestry was simple and convincing. On a sheer-cut village of low ferns, where daisies stood up like trees, a slender lady poised, her dark sandaled feet on the pin-like turf. Her figure was all swathed round with a spotless dress of woolly white, softened by age into a golden misty tone, and a pair of friendly and confidential rabbits sat close to her golden slippers. The lady’s face was candid and mild; her eyes were soft, and around her head was wound a fillet of woven threads, mellow in tone, a red, no doubt, originally, but softened to a coral pink by time. This lady in all her grace and virginal sweetness was only half of the woven story. To her right stood a youth in forest green, his sword drawn, and his intention evidently to kill a creature which, near to the gentle rabbits, out of the daisied grass lifted its cruel snakelike head. For nearly five hundred years the serpent’s venom had been poised, and if the serpent should start the Green Knight would strike, too, at the same magic moment.