him good-morning; and in Lucy’s eyes--Lucy’s eyes, he thought, with a half smile, would be the most inquisitive--they would ask him a hundred questions. They would say, with almost a look of anxiety in them, “Oh! Mr. Bertram--why?” It amused him to think that Lucy would be the most curious of them all, though why, I could not venture to say. He got himself ready very slowly, looking out from the corner of his window at all the smart people of the county gathering upon the lawn. There was tennis going on somewhere, he could hear, and the less loud but equally characteristic stroke of the croquet balls. And the band, which was a famous band from London, had begun to play. If he was to appear at all, it was time that he should go downstairs; but, as a matter of fact, he was not really moved to do this, until he saw a little flight across the green of a small child in white, so swift that some one had to stoop and pick her up as he picked up Tiny at the gate of Greenbank. The man on the lawn who caught this little thing lifted her up as Bertram had done. Would the child be hushed by his grasp, and look into his face as Tiny had looked at him? Perhaps this was not Tiny--at all events, it gave no look, but wriggled and struggled out of its captor’s hands. This sight decided Bertram to present himself in the midst of Mrs. Wradisley’s guests. He wanted to see Tiny once again. CHAPTER VII. Bertram soon lost himself among the crowd on the lawn, among all the county people and the village people, making his way out and in, in a solitude which never feels so great as among a crowd. It seemed wonderful to him, as it is specially to those who have been more or less in what is called “Society,” that he saw nobody whom he knew. That is a thing almost impossible to happen for those that are born within that charmed circle. Whether at the end of the world or in the midst of it, it is incredible that you should see an assemblage of human creatures without discovering one who is familiar at least, if not friendly--unless, indeed, you wander into regions unknown to society; and Mrs. Wradisley and her guests would all have been indignant indeed had that been for a moment imagined of them. But yet this is a thing that does happen now and then, and Bertram traversed the lawns and flower gardens and conservatories without meeting a single face which he recognized or being greeted by one voice he had ever heard before. To be sure, this was partly owing to the fact that the person of whom he was specially in search was a very small person, to be distinguished at a very low pitch of stature near to the ground, not at tall on a level with the other forms. There were a few children among the groups on the lawn, and he pursued a white frock in various directions, which, when found, proved to contain some one who was not Tiny; but at last he came to that little person clinging to Lucy’s skirts as she moved about among her mother’s guests.