‘You won’t tell, will you, dear?’

‘Tell what?’ he asked, staring at her.

’Don’t tell Mr. Hammond what I said about his thinking me ugly.  He might want to apologise to me, and that would be too humiliating.  I was very childish to say such a silly thing.’

‘Undoubtedly you were.’

‘And you won’t tell him?’

’Tell him anything that would degrade my Mary?  Assail her dignity by so much as a breath?  Sooner would I have this tongue torn out with red-hot pincers.’

On the next day, and the next, sunshine and summer skies still prevailed; but Mr. Hammond did not seem to care for rambling far afield.  He preferred loitering about in the village, rowing on the lake, reading in the garden, and playing lawn tennis.  He had only inclination for those amusements which kept him within a stone’s throw of Fellside:  and Mary knew that this disposition had arisen in his mind since Lesbia had withdrawn herself from all share in their excursions.  Lesbia had not been rude to her brother or her brother’s friend; she had declined their invitations with smiles and sweetness; but there was always some reason—­a new song to be practised, a new book to be read, a letter to be written—­why she should not go for drives or walks or steamboat trips with Maulevrier and his friend.

So Mr. Hammond suddenly found out that he had seen all that was worth seeing in the Lake country, and that there was nothing so enjoyable as the placid idleness of Fellside; and at Fellside Lady Lesbia could not always avoid him without a too-marked intention, so he tasted the sweetness of her society to a much greater extent than was good for his peace, if the case were indeed as hopeless as Lady Mary declared.  He strolled about the grounds with her; he drank the sweet melody of her voice in Heine’s tenderest ballads; he read to her on the sunlit lawn in the lazy afternoon hours; he played billiards with her; he was her faithful attendant at afternoon tea; he gave himself up to the study of her character, which, to his charmed eyes, seemed the perfection of pure and placid womanhood.  There might, perhaps, be some lack of passion and of force in this nature, a marked absence of that impulsive feeling which is a charm in some women:  but this want was atoned for by sweetness of character, and Mr. Hammond argued that in these calm natures there is often an unsuspected depth, a latent force, a grandeur of soul, which only reveals itself in the great ordeals of life.

So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly.

‘I had no idea you were such a tame cat,’ he said:  ’if when we were salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I shouldn’t have believed a word of it.’

‘We had plenty of roughing on the shores of the St. Lawrence,’ answered Hammond.  ‘Summer idleness in a drawing-room is an agreeable variety.’