After an early dinner the major took rod and line and set off to capture a few trout for supper. Aunt Felicité took her post-prandial nap discreetly, in an easy-chair, and Captain George and Miss Holme were left to their own devices. In Love's sweet Castle of Indolence the hours that make up a summer afternoon pass like so many minutes. They two had blown the magic horn and had gone in. The gates of brass had closed behind them, shutting them up from the common outer world. Over all things was a glamour as of witchcraft. Soft music filled the air; soft breezes came to them as from fields of amaranth and asphodel. They walked ever in a magic circle, that widened before them as they went. Eros in passing had touched them with his golden dart. Each of them hid the sweet sting from the other, yet neither of them would have been whole again for anything the world could have offered. What need to tell the old old story over again--the story of the dawn of love in two young hearts that had never loved before? Janet went home that night in a flutter of happiness--a happiness so sweet and strange and yet so vague that she could not have analysed it even had she been casuist enough to try to do so. But she was content to accept the fact as a fact; beyond that she cared nothing. No syllable of love had been spoken between her and George: they had passed what to an outsider would have seemed a very commonplace afternoon. They had talked together--not sentiment, but every-day topics of the world around them; they had read together--poetry, but nothing more passionate than "Aurora Leigh;" they had walked together--rather a silent and stupid walk, our friendly outsider would have urged; but if they were content, no one else had any right to complain. And so the day had worn itself away,--a red-letter day for ever in the calendar of their young lives. CHAPTER III. THE NARRATIVE OF SERGEANT NICHOLAS. One morning when Janet had been about three weeks at Dupley Walls, she was summoned to the door by one of the servants, and found there a tall, thin, middle-aged man, dressed in plain clothes, and having all the appearance of a discharged soldier. "I have come a long way, miss," he said to Janet, carrying a finger to his forehead, "in order to see Lady Pollexfen and have a little private talk with her." "I am afraid that her ladyship will scarcely see you, unless you can give her some idea of the business that you have called upon." "My name, miss, is Sergeant John Nicholas. I served formerly in India, where I was body-servant to her ladyship's son, Captain Charles Pollexfen, who died there of cholera nearly twenty years ago, and I have something of importance to communicate."