Mr. Kingston led the way down a little track to a place where the trees grew so close together that the murderous scythes had not been able to get in among them. Here the bracken had been unmolested, and was going unharassed through all its most gorgeous pageant. Great fronds of ivory white, of palest gold, of brownest gold, of reddest gold upreared themselves among the purple waves of the heather, wearing the stray flecks of the sunshine like jewels on their breasts. We sat down on a fallen tree round which the bracken had wrapped its splendour. "How extraordinarily beautiful it is!" he said, more to himself than to me, putting out his long, artistic hand, gnarled and hardened with work, and touching a pale frond with a reverent finger. "I am glad to have seen it once more. It is twenty-five years since I have seen an English autumn." There was a moment's silence, and then he went on without any change of tone: "And you are thinking, you sad-faced, downright little woman who are so afraid that I am going to make your dear Aunt Emmy unhappy, you are thinking that you did not take a precarious seat on this trunk in order to hear a possible enemy descant on the beauties of nature." I was astonished at his penetration. My own experience, gleaned entirely from the genial little egotist whose wife I was, had taught me that men never noticed anything. I had had no idea that I had shown the fear of him which I felt. "And yet you are my only possible ally," he went on, "my only helper, if you are willing to help me, in the somewhat difficult task which I have in hand." "You mean, marrying my aunt?" I said. "No," he said, looking at me with a kindness which made me ready to sink into the ground with shame. "I can do _that_ without assistance. Emmy, God bless her! has been ready to marry me any time these twenty-five years, and, poor soul, she is ready now. She has not the faintest idea what she would be in for if she did, but she is ready to risk it." I was silent. I was bewildered for one thing, and I did not want "to put my foot in it" again immediately for another. And there was really no need for me to speak, for he went on slowly, looking full at me: "What I have to do, if I can, is to save Emmy's romance for her." I could only stare at him. "For twenty-five years," he went on, "that dear woman has lived on her love for me. It has coloured her whole life. I know what I know. It has been her support in all the endless years she nursed that cruel old egoist her father, who would not let her marry me, when we _could_ have married, seventeen years ago. But it is not _me_ that she wants now, though she did want me for many years; it is the thought of me--if you can't understand without my saying it, I can't make you--it's her romance which is important to her, and which I want her to keep, at all costs."