She had no sooner departed than Gladys began flicking the American, in playful childish sport, with a spray of early roses. He entered willingly into the game, and a pleasant tussle ensued between them as he sought to snatch the flowers out of her hands. She resisted but he pushed her backwards, and held her imprisoned against the edge of the table, teasing her as if she were a romping child of twelve. “So you are going to these classes alone, are you?” he said. “I see that your English clergymen are allowed extraordinary privileges. I expect you cause him a good deal of agitation, poor dear man, if you flirt with him as shamelessly as you do with me. Well, go ahead! I’m not responsible for you. In fact I’m all for spurring you on. It’ll amuse me to see what happens. But no doubt all sorts of things have happened already! I suppose you’ve made Mr. Clavering desperately in love with you. I expect you persecute him unmercifully. I know you. I know your ways.” He playfully pinched her arm. “But go on. It’ll be an amusement to me to watch the result of all this. I like being a sort of sympathetic onlooker, in these things. I like the idea of hiding behind the scenes, and watching the tricks of a naughty little flirt like you, set upon troubling the mind of a poor harmless minister.” The reply made by the daughter of the House to this challenge was a simple but effective one. Like a mischievous infant caught in some unpardonable act, she flagrantly and shamelessly put out her tongue at him. Long afterwards, with curious feelings, Dangelis recalled this gesture. He associated it to the end of his life with the indefinable smell of cut flowers, with their stalks in water, and the pungency of peony-petals. Tea, when it reached our friends upon the stately east terrace, proved a gay and festive meal. The absence of the reserved and nervous Italian, and also of the master of Nevilton, rendered all three persons more completely and freely at their ease, than they had ever been since the American’s first appearance. The grass was being cut at that corner of the park, and the fresh delicious smell, full of the very sap of the earth, poured in upon them across the sunny flower beds. The chattering of young starlings, the cawing of young rooks, blended pleasantly with the swish of the scythes and the laughter of the hay-makers; and from the distant village floated softly to their ears all those vague and characteristic sounds which accompany the close of a hot day, and the release from labour of men and beasts. As they devoured their bread and butter with that naive greediness which is part of the natural atmosphere of this privileged hour in an English home, the three friends indicated by their playful temper and gay discourse that they each had secret reasons for self-congratulation.