and Berkshire manors, the petty splendours of the architect and the upholsterer, weighed against a world in which all nature is on a grander scale?  Mr. Smithson might give her fine houses and costly upholstery; but only the Tropic of Cancer could give her larger and brighter stars, a world of richer colouring, a land of perpetual summer, nights luminous with fire-flies, gardens in which the fern and the cactus were as forest trees, and where humming-birds flashed among the foliage like living flowers; nay, where the flowers themselves took the forms of the animal world and seemed instinct with life and motion.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Smithson, with his gentlemanlike drawl, ’Spanish America and the West Indies are delightful places to talk about.  There are so many things one leaves out of the picture—­thieves, niggers, jiggers, snakes, mosquitoes, yellow Jack, creeping, crawling creatures of all kinds.  I always feel very glad I have been to South America.’

‘Why?’

‘In order that I may never go there again,’ replied Mr. Smithson.

‘I was beginning to hope you would take me there some day,’ said Lesbia.

’Never again, no, not even for your sake.  No man should ever leave Europe after he is five-and-thirty; indeed, I doubt if after that age he should venture beyond the Mediterranean.  That is the sea of civilisation.  Anything outside it means barbarism.’

‘I hope we are going to travel by-and-by,’ said Lesbia; ’I have been mewed up in Grasmere half my life, and if you are going to confine me to the shores of the Mediterranean, which is, after all, only a larger lake, for the other half of my life, my existence will be a dull piece of work after all.  I agree with what Don Gomez said the other night:  “Not to travel is not to live."’

They went on deck presently and sat in the summer darkness, lighted only by the stars, and by the lights of the yachts, and the faintly gleaming windows of the lighted town, sat long and late, in a state of ineffable repose.  Lady Kirkbank. fortified by the produce of Mr. Smithson’s particular clos, and by a couple of glasses of green Chartreuse, slept profoundly.  She had not enjoyed herself so much for the last three months.  She had been stretched on Society’s rack, and she had been ground in Society’s mill; and neither mind nor body had been her own to do what she liked withal.  She had toiled early and late, and had spared herself in no wise.  And now the trouble was over for a space.  Here were rest and respite.  She had done her duty as a chaperon, had provided her charge with the very best thing the matrimonial market offered.  She had paid her creditors something on account all round, and had left them appeased and trustful, if not content.  Sir George had gone oft alone to drink the waters at Spa, and to fortify himself for Scotland and the grouse season.  She was her own mistress, and she could fold her hands and take her rest, eat and drink and sleep and be merry, all at Mr. Smithson’s expense.