They drove down to Rood Hall early next week, Sir George conveying them in his drag, with a change of horses at Maidenhead.  The weather was peerless; the country exquisite, approached from London.  How different that river landscape looks to the eyes of the traveller returning from the wild West of England, the wooded gorges of Cornwall and Devon, the Tamar and the Dart.  Then how small and poor and mean seems silvery Thames, gliding peacefully between his willowy bank, singing his lullaby to the whispering sedges; a poor little river, a flat commonplace landscape, says the traveller, fresh from moorland and tor, from the rocky shore of the Atlantic, the deep clefts of the great, red hills.

To Lesbia’s eyes the placid stream and the green pastures, breathing odours of meadow-sweet and clover, seemed passing lovely.  She was pleased with her own hat and parasol too, which made her graciously disposed towards the landscape; and the last packet of gloves from North Audley Street fitted without a wrinkle.  The glovemaker was beginning to understand her hand, which was a study for a sculptor, but which had its little peculiarities.

Nor was she ill-disposed to Mr. Smithson, who had come up to town by an early train, in order to lunch in Arlington Street and go back by coach, seated just behind Lady Lesbia, who had the box seat beside Sir George.

The drive was delightful.  It was a few minutes after five when the coach drove past the picturesque old gate-house into Mr. Smithson’s Park, and Rood Hall lay on the low ground in front of them, with its back to the river.  It was an old red brick house in the Tudor style, with an advanced porch, and four projecting wings, three stories high, with picturesque spire roofs overtopping the main building.  Around the house ran a boldly-carved stone parapet, bearing the herons and bulrushes which were the cognisance of the noble race for which the mansion was built.  Numerous projecting mullioned windows broke up the line of the park front.  Lesbia was fain to own that Rood Hall was even better than Park Lane.  In London Mr. Smithson had created a palace; but it was a new palace, which still had a faint flavour of bricks and mortar, and which was apt to remind the spectator of that wonderful erection of Aladdin, the famous Parvenu of Eastern story.  Here, in Berkshire, Mr. Smithson had dropped into a nest which had been kept warm for him for three centuries, aired and beautified by generations of a noble race which had obligingly decayed and dwindled in order to make room for Mr. Smithson.  Here the Parvenu had bought a home mellowed by the slow growth of years, touched into poetic beauty by the chastening fingers of time.  His artist friends told him that every brick in the red walls was ‘precious,’ a mystery of colour which only a painter could fitly understand and value.  Here he had bought associations, he had bought history.  He had bought the dust of Elizabeth’s senators, the bones of her court beauties.  The coffins in the Mausoleum yonder in the ferny depths of the Park, the village church just outside the gates—­these had all gone with the property.