And there was one other person to whom this lady was equally enchanting, who never wanted the song pitched in any other key, who listened in rapt delight so long as he was allowed to listen and gaze and dream--Miles Challoner, who had left town so soon as he found the pretty Bayswater villa deserted, on Gertrude's departure for Italy. He had no farther tie to London, and cared not to remain haunting the neighbourhood of the nest whence his "bird with the shining head" had fled. He became suddenly convinced of the utter emptiness of metropolitan existence, and expatiated thereon to Lord Sandilands in a way which greatly amused the old nobleman. He declared that these nineteenth-century views of life were false and wrongly based; that half the vices and shortcomings of the provincial poor and the labouring classes were due to the absenteeism of the landlords, who by example should lead their inferiors. The holder of an estate, Miles said, be it small or large, had duties which should keep him among his people. He felt that he had neglected these duties; and though he was not specially cut for a country gentleman's life, he knew that he ought to go down to Rowley Court, and do his best to get on in that sphere of life to which he had been called. The young man said all this with great earnestness, for at the moment he really believed it; and he was half-inclined to be angry when Lord Sandilands, who had listened to the rhapsody with a grave and attentive face, could contain himself no longer, but broke into a smile as he said that he thought Miles perfectly right, "particularly as the shooting-season was coming on." So Miles left London, and went to his old ancestral home. The bright bountiful beauty of summer still decked the woods and fields; the old servants and the villagers vied with each other in welcoming the young squire; and Miles felt that he had done rightly in following what he was pleased to call the dictates of his conscience, in coming back. The small sum of money which he had expended on the estate had been judiciously laid out, and improvement was manifest everywhere--in heavy crops, mended fences, and common land drained and reclaimed; in repaired outhouses, and shooting properly preserved; and, better than all, in a higher class of tenantry, and larger rents. Miles Challoner had never felt the pleasant sense of proprietorship until this visit to his home. He walked round his fields, he stood on little vantage-points and surveyed his estate, with an inward feeling of pride which he did not care to check. It _was_ something to be an English country gentleman, after all. He had been nothing and no one in London, a hanger-on, a unit in the great social stream--no better than a dancing barrister, or a flirting clerk in a government office; two-thirds of the people he visited knowing his name, and that he had been properly introduced to them by some accountable person, but nothing more.