And first he said that it was an English face in repose, and yet not an English face when the repose was lost. The masses of jet black hair would have excited no surprise upon the Corso at Rome or shining in an aureole cast out from a Florentine window. Here, in England, the tresses spoke of the South and its suns--and yet, in flat contradiction, the perfect skin, smooth and silky as the leaf of a pink white rose, could tell of English lanes and sunless days and the kinder climate of the North. Character he read in the firm contour of her chin--romance and passion in the deep blue of her eyes and the modulations of a voice whose music had not been lost in the roaring Saturnalia of the modern _salon_. That he himself had so far failed to attract her notice was a fact which neither wounded his vanity nor abated his interest. It had been the first maxim of his life to hasten slowly, and to no pursuit was this maxim more necessary than to that of friendship. This, then, was the estimate which one strong personality formed of another; the man saying to himself, "I would read this woman's heart!" the woman asking herself if she must talk architecture until the Earl came to her assistance. Breaking the ice with a common observation, she remarked that she had seen him galloping across the park and regretted the dilatory habit which kept her in bed. "Getting up is a foreign art," she said. "It lives in kitchens and places where they scrub. The doctors positively forbid it nowadays. And, of course, life is too short to disobey the doctors." Gavin looked at her with the air of a man who has too much common sense to deal in frivolities and rarely troubled to say the thing which was not. "They talk nonsense," he said quietly; "the profession is becoming far too commercial. It lives and thrives upon the credulity of fools. Just consider--man is the only animal which does not glory in the Creator's gift, the dawning day and all its wonders. For what do we change it! For the electric light and the champagne which disagrees with us? We borrow of the night and then grumble because we have nothing to offer the day. If men could get up at five o'clock and go to bed at ten, they would begin to understand the realities of living." Evelyn, much amused at his earnestness and quite understanding that some pleasant originality of character dictated the outburst, looked at him a little mischievously from beneath her long lashes while she said: "In winter--surely not five o'clock then, Mr. Ord?"