Gabrielle, however, was quite unconscious of the struggle that divided Mrs. Payne's breast. She was a child launched on a holiday with the friend of her choice in the most delightful season of the year. She didn't scent any hostility in the atmosphere of Overton; and this was strange in a person who moved through life by the aid of intuitions rather than reasons. She felt contented at Overton, just as she had felt contented at Roscarna. She was more at home there than she could ever have been at Lapton or Clonderriff; her mind was as sensitive to sky changes as the surface of a lonely lake. Mrs. Payne had given her an airy bedroom facing west, and while the maid unpacked her things Gabrielle stood at the window looking out over meadows, golden in the low sun. Beneath her lay the lawns, smooth and kempt and of a rich, an almost Irish green, on which the black shadows of cedar branches were spread. A tall hedge of privet divided the lawns from the vegetable garden in which a man was working methodically. She saw the pattern of paths and hedges from above as though they were lines in a picture. In the middle of the lawn stood a square of clipped yew trees, making a hollow chamber of the kind that formal gardeners call a yew-parlour, with a stone sundial in the middle of it. "What a jolly place for children to play in," she thought. A blackbird broke into a whistle in the privet hedge and brought her heart to her mouth. Could any nightingale sing sweeter? "I think that is all, madam," said the maid demurely. Gabrielle smiled at her and thanked her, and the girl smiled back. Like everything else in Mrs. Payne's admirably managed house she was fresh and clean, homelier than the frigid servants at Halberton House, happier--that was the only word--than Gabrielle's own servants at Lapton. Yes, happier---- When she came downstairs Arthur was waiting for her. "I thought you were never coming," he said. Their time was short and he was anxious to show her all the altars of his childhood. They met Mrs. Payne in the hall. She smiled at them with encouragement, for it was part of her settled plan to let them have their own way and so tempt them into a naturalness that might betray them. She, too, had the feeling that she was fighting against time. Arthur was full of enthusiasms. They went together to the stables, where he introduced her to Hollis, the coachman standing in his shirtsleeves in a saddle-room that smelt of harness-polish. He stood in front of a cracked mirror brushing his hair, hissing softly, as though he were grooming a horse, and round his waist was a red-striped belt of the webbing out of which a horse's belly-band is made. "Well, Mr. Arthur, you're looking up finely, sir," he said, touching his forelock. Even the stables exhaled the same atmosphere of pleasant leisure as the house.