“Ah!” said old Jeffcott, looking sardonic.  “And you not met for five years!  Do you ever wonder to yourself what sort of a man he may be after five years, Miss Sylvia?  It’s a long time for a young man to keep in love at a distance.  It’s a very long time.”

“It’s a long time for both of us,” said Sylvia.  “But it hasn’t altered us in that respect.”

“It’s been a longer time for him than it has for you,” said Jeffcott shrewdly.  “I’ll warrant he’s lived every minute of it.  He’s the sort that would.”

Sylvia’s wide brows drew together in a little frown.  She had caught the note of warning in the old man’s words, and she did not understand it.

“What do you mean, Jeffcott?” she said, with a touch of sharpness.

But Jeffcott backed out of the vinery and out of the discussion at the same moment.  “You’ll know what I mean one day, Miss Sylvia,” he said darkly, “when you’re married.”

“Silly old man!” said Sylvia, taking up the cluster of grapes for which she had come and departing in the opposite direction.  Jeffcott was a faithful old servant, but he could be very exasperating when he liked.

The gardens were bathed in the evening sunlight as she passed through them on her way to the house.  The old Manor stood out grey and ancient against an opal sky.  She looked up at it with loving eyes.  Her home meant very much to Sylvia Ingleton.  Until the last six months she had always regarded it as her own life-long possession.  For she was an only child, and for the past three years she had been its actual mistress, though virtually she had held the reins of government longer than that.  Her mother had been delicate for as long as she could remember, and it was on account of her failing health that Sylvia had left school earlier than had been intended, that she might be with her.  Since Mrs. Ingleton’s death, three years before, she and her father had lived alone together at the old Manor in complete accord.  They had always been close friends, the only dissension that had ever arisen between them having been laid aside by mutual consent.

That dissension had been caused by Guy Ranger.  Five years before, when Sylvia had been only eighteen, he had flashed like a meteor through her sky, and no other star had ever shone for her again.  Though seven years older than herself, he was little more than a boy, full of gaiety and life, possessing an extraordinary fascination, but wholly lacking in prospects, being no more than the son of Squire Ingleton’s bailiff.

The Rangers were people of good yeoman extraction, and Guy himself had had a public school education, but the fact of their position was an obstacle which the squire had found insuperable.  Only his love for his daughter had restrained him from violent measures.  But Sylvia had somehow managed to hold him, how no one ever knew, for he was a man of fiery temper.  And the end of if it had been that Guy had been banished