In the great hall all the servants were gathered to welcome us, an ensemble of liveries and courtesies in which I distinguished only Mrs. Woods, the housekeeper, very grave, a little hoarse, and clothed on with black satin. We escaped as soon as possible, Pelleas and I not having been formed by heaven to play the important squire and his lady arriving home to bonfires and village bells and a chorus of our rent roll. But once safely in the lordly sitting room of our suite, with its canopies and a dais, and epergnes filled with orchids, I had but to look at Pelleas to feel wonderfully at home. It is a blessed thing to love some one so much that you feel at home together in any place of deserts or perils or even lordly rooms filled with orchids. On that first evening we were destined to chance upon another blessed thing of the same quality. After our solitary dinner in the stately dining-room, Pelleas and I went wandering in the grounds, very still in the hush of June with June’s little moon lying on the sky. Little Rosemont is a place of well-swept lawns, and orchards then newly freed from the spell of their bloom; it is a place of great spaces and long naves, with groves whose trees seem to have been drawn together to some secret lyre. The house is a miracle of line and from its deep verandas one sees afar off a band of the sea, as if some god had struck it from the gray east. And everywhere at that glad season were the roses, thousands and thousands of roses--ah, fancy using figures to compute roses quite as one does in defraying debts. Though indeed as Pelleas frivolously said, “‘Time brings roses’ but so does money!” For many of those assembled were from Persia and Cashmere and I dare say from Lud and Phut. I think that I have never had an experience of great delight at which a band of familiar, singing things was not present; and when I remember the month at Little Rosemont it is as if the roses were the musical interludes, like a Greek chorus, explaining what is. They hang starry on almost every incident; unless perhaps on that of the night of our arrival, when we are told that Nichola in the servants’ dining-hall produced a basket which she had brought with her and calmly took therefrom her Guinea goat of the day before and ate it, before all assembled, beginning at the horns! From the driveway on that first walk Pelleas and I looked up to a balcony over which the roses were at carnival. It was the kind of balcony that belongs to a moon and I half suspect all such balconies to be moon-made and invisible by sun or starlight; it was the kind of balcony that one finds in very old books, and one is certain that if any other than a lover were to step thereon it would forthwith crumble away. Pelleas, looking up at the balcony, irrelevantly said:-- “Do you remember the young rector over there in Inglese? The Reverend Arthur Didbin? Who married Viola to Our Telephone the other day?”