"As you kindly allowed me to ask him, Aunt Margaret," he said, punctiliously. "I've no objection to Mr Staunton, you can bring him over," said Mrs Waynflete. But whatever her own feelings as to the new home were, she watched keenly for Guy's impressions of it. He said no word to gratify her; but in that perfect summer day, he, in his turn, noted every detail. The old house, with the deep and varied tinting of its lichen-covered tiles and bushy creepers, seemed to him, as he stood in the garden, and looked at it intently, to be full of character and individuality. In his secret heart, he thought, as he had thought before, that the place had a charm altogether its own. How he should like its quaintness and its beauty if it ever was his own, and if--Nay, how he did like it now, and how oddly he felt himself to be a son of its soil--to be, somehow, akin to it. Guy was in all ways sensitive and impressionable, open to the influences that surrounded him, to every change of scene and atmosphere. He wandered round the flower-beds, and looked for the quaint "old" flowers of which Florella had spoken. Could he find any to show her? Yes; there were columbines of odd, dull, artistic tints, roses of sorts unheeded by the horticulturist, and sundry blossoms, somewhat belated in the keen northern air, of which the ignorant Guy knew nothing. As he looked, Rawdon Crawley began to bark; the sound of wheels was heard, and a waggonette, full of straw hats and bright dresses, drove up the rough ill-kept road that led to the house. Guy, half-smiling, held a little back, as he saw his brother press forward eagerly; he was amused at the idea of Godfrey in love, not having ceased to regard him as a schoolboy. He was not in love himself; but even for him, as he came forward, it was Constancy who held the stage, looking handsome and happy, a concentration of life. "I am perfectly convinced," she said, looking round, after the greetings were over, "that this place breathes out a story. It quite _talks_ with characteristicness!" "I should like to think that you had to do with the story of it," said Godfrey, feeling his ears hot with the sense of self-committal. Constancy looked at him, and at that moment there entered into her a particularly charming and engaging little demon, who recommended himself to her in a form which disguised his old and well-known features, and made him come out quite new. Godfrey was betraying himself in every word and look; but to Constancy, whose even pulses had never yet beat quicker for any emotion whatever, his boyish passion did not present itself in a serious light. She might study this side of life a little, it would be amusing and instructive. It has been amusing, ever since Cleopatra angled for fishes. The result of her study was that Godfrey spent a day of chequered but tumultuous bliss, and that the story of the old house mingled itself inextricably with her own.