“Disappointed to see you!” said Peter, stupefied.

She stepped forth, laughing, and Peter followed her closely.  John Crewys stood aside to let them pass.  Lady Mary, half amazed and half amused, realized suddenly that her son had forgotten he came back to fetch her.  She hesitated on the threshold.  More cheers and confused shouting greeted Peter’s reappearance on the balcony.  He turned and waved to his mother, and the canon came hurrying over the grass.

“The people are shouting for Lady Mary; they want Lady Mary,” he cried.

John Crewys looked at her with a smile, and held out his hand, and she stepped over the sill, and went away across the terrace garden with him.

The doctor turned his face from the crowd, and went back alone into the empty room.

“Who doesn’t want Lady Mary?” he said to himself, forlornly.

CHAPTER XIV

Peter stood on his own front door steps, on the shady side of the house, in the fresh air of the early morning.  The unnecessary eyeglass twinkled on his breast as he looked forth upon the goodliness and beauty of his inheritance.  The ever-encroaching green of summer had not yet overpowered the white wealth of flowering spring; for the season was a late one, and the month of June still young.

The apple-trees were yet in blossom, and the snowy orchards were scattered over the hillsides between patches of golden gorse.  The lilacs, white and purple, were in flower, amid scarlet rhododendrons and branching pink and yellow tree-azaleas.  The weeping barberry showered gold dust upon the road.

On the lower side of the drive, the rolling grass slopes were thriftily left for hay; a flowering mass of daisies, and buttercups, and red clover, and blue speedwell.

A long way off, but still clearly visible in the valley below, glistened the stone-tiled roof of the old square-towered church, guarded by its sentinel yews.

A great horse-chestnut stood like a giant bouquet of waxen bloom beside a granite monument which threw a long shadow over the green turf mounds towards the west, and marked the grave of Sir Timothy Crewys.

Peter saw that monument more plainly just now than all the rest of his surroundings, although he was short-sighted, and although his eyes were further dimmed by sudden tears.

His memories of his father were not particularly tender ones, and his grief was only natural filial sentiment in its vaguest and lightest form.  But such as it was—­the sight of the empty study, which was to be his own room in future; the strange granite monument shining in the sun; the rush of home associations which the familiar landscape aroused—­augmented it for the time being, and made the young man glad of a moment’s solitude.

There was the drooping ash—­which had made such a cool, refreshing tent in summer—­where he had learnt his first lessons at his mother’s knee, and where he had kept his rabbit-hutch for a season, until his father had found it out, and despatched it to the stable-yard.