For the past three or four years the social exigencies of Government House life had not proved conducive to fervour of any kind, and now, while he was dawdling away his time at Bruff, in the uninterested expectation of another appointment, he found that he not only could not write, but that he seemed to have lost the wish to try. “I suppose I am sinking into the usual bucolic stupor,” he said to himself, as he abandoned the search for the vagrant rhyme. “If I only could read the _Field_, and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing, I should be an ideal country gentleman.” He crumpled into his pocket again the envelope on the back of which he had been scribbling, and told himself that it was more philosophic and more simple to enjoy things in the homely, pre-historic manner, without trying to express them elaborately for the benefit of others. He was intellectually effete, and what made his effeteness more hopeless was that he recognised it himself. “I am perfectly happy if I let myself alone,” was the sum of his reflections. “They gave me a little more culture than I could hold, and it ran over the edge at first. Now I think I’m just about sufficiently up in the bottle for Lismoyle form.” He tilted his straw hat over his nose, shut his eyes, and, leaning back, soon felt the delicious fusion into his brain of the surrounding hum and soft movement that tells of the coming of out-of-door summer sleep. It is deplorable to think of the figure Christopher must cut in the eyes of those whose robuster taste demands in a young man some more potent and heroic qualities, a gentlemanly hardihood in language and liquor, an interesting suggestion of moral obliquity, or, at least, some hereditary vice on which the character may make shipwreck with magnificent helplessness. Christopher, with his preference for his sister’s society, and his lack of interest in the majority of manly occupations, from hunting to music halls, has small claim to respect or admiration. The invertebrateness of his character seemed to be expressed in his attitude, as he lay, supine, under the birch trees, with the grass making a luxurious couch for his lazy limbs, and the faint breeze just stirring about him. His sleep was not deep enough to still the breath of summer in his ears, but it had quieted the jabber of the magpie to a distant purring, and he was fast falling into the abyss of unconsciousness, when a gentle, regular sound made itself felt, the fall of a footstep and the brushing of a skirt through the grass. He lay very still, and cherished an ungenial hope that the white-stemmed birches might mercifully screen him from the invader. The step came nearer, and something in its solidity and determination gave Christopher a guess as to whose it was, that was speedily made certainty by a call that jarred all the sleepy enchantment of the glade. “Fran-cie!”