Great sensation! Naturally everyone is impressed by this startling declaration, and Miss Forbes is actually overcome. At all events, she subsides behind her parasol, and is for a little time lost in thought. ‘Yes, yes. Charming people—charming!’ says Lady Forster quickly, if a little hysterically; and the poet, having seen Susan’s eye upon him and his pose, and feeling that he has not endured the last half-hour in vain, struggles into a more every-day attitude. Pins and needles, however, having set in in the most _posé_ of the legs, he is conscious of a good deal of unpleasantness, and at last a desire to get up. Essaying to rise, however, it distinctly declines to support him, and, to his everlasting chagrin, he falls ‘plop’ upon the ground again, in a painfully inartistic position this time. ‘Anything wrong, old man? Got a cramp?’ asks Captain Lennox, hauling him into sitting posture. ‘It is nothing, nothing,’ says the poet sadly. Oh, what it is to dwell in the tents of the Philistines! ‘I was merely overcome by the beauty of this divine spot.’ He gives a sickly glance at Susan. ‘Such tones, you know! Such colour! Such a satisfying atmosphere!’ Here Susan, who is under the impression that he is ill, brings him hurriedly a cup of coffee, which he takes, pressing her hand, and murmuring to her inaudible, but no doubt very ‘precious,’ things. ‘One yearns over the beautiful always,’ says he. It is plain to everyone that he is yearning over Susan, and Crosby, looking on, feels a sudden mad longing to kick him over the laurel hedge on to the road below. ‘And such a spot as this wakes all one’s dreams into life. Those trees! Those distant glimpses! The little soft throbs of Nature—Mother Nature! All, all can be felt!’ ‘I wish to heaven I could make him feel something!’ says Sir William in a low but moving tone. ‘And there—over there; see those green glimpses, the parting of the leaves.’ ‘Oh, go on, go on,’ says Miss Barry, growing tearful behind her glasses. ‘This is indeed beautiful!’ ‘Dear lady, you feel it too! There’—pointing to where the Cottage trees seem to become one with those of the Rectory—at which Wyndham starts slightly, ‘one can see the delicate blendings of Nature’s sweetest tints, and can fancy that from between those pleasant leaves a face might once again, as in the old, sweet phantasies, peep forth. This dear place looks as if Hamadryads had not yet died from out the world: as if still they might be found inhabitating these lovely ways. Almost it seems to me as if their divine faces might even now be seen, peeping through those perfumed greeneries beyond.’ CHAPTER XLII. ‘Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords as any polysyllable in the language.’ Involuntarily, unconsciously, all their eyes follow his, to the trees in the Cottage grounds. And there ‘All orators are dumb when beauty pleadeth.’