‘Miss Stewart?  Yes.’

‘What do you think of her?’

‘A little nincompoop.  Quite harmless!’

The handsome hero smiled—­unseen by his companion.

Meanwhile Farrell was walking with Nelly through the stately series of walled gardens, which his grandfather had planned and carried out, mainly it seemed for the boredom of the grandson.

‘What do we want with all these things now?’ he said, waving an impatient hand, as he and Nelly stood at the top flight of steps looking down upon the three gardens sloping to the south, with their fragments of statuary, and old leaden statuettes, ranged along the central walks.  ’They’re all out of date.  They were before the war; and the war has given them the coup de grace.  No more big estates—­no more huge country houses!  My grandfather built and built, for the sake of building, and I pay for his folly.  After the war!—­what sort of a world shall we tumble into!’

‘I don’t want these gardens destroyed!’ said Nelly, looking up at him.  ‘No one ought to spoil them.  They’re far too beautiful!’

She was beginning to speak with more freedom, to be less afraid of him.  The gap between her small provincial experience and modes of thought, and his, was narrowing.  Each was beginning to discover the inner personality of the other.  And the more Farrell explored her the more charmed he was.  She was curiously ignorant, whether of books or life.  Even the busy commercial life amid which she had been brought up, as it seemed to him, she had observed but little.  When he asked her questions about Manchester, she was generally vague or puzzled.  He saw that she was naturally romantic; and her passion for the absent Sarratt, together with her gnawing anxiety about him which could not be concealed, made her, again, very touching in the eyes of a man of imagination whose feelings were quick and soft.  He walked about with her for more than an hour, discoursing ironically on the Grecian temples, the rustic bridges and pools and fountains, now in imitation of the older Versailles and now of the Trianon, with which his grandfather had burdened his descendants; so that the glorious evening, as it descended, presently became a merry duel between him and her, she defending and admiring his own possessions, and he attacking them.  Her eyes sparkled, and a bright red—­a natural red—­came back into her pale cheeks.  She spoke and moved with an evident exhilaration, as though she realised her own developing powers, and was astonished by her own readiness of speech, and the sheer pleasure of talk.  And something, no doubt, entered in of the new scene; its scale and magnificence, so different from anything she had yet known; its suggestion of a tradition reaching back through many generations, and of a series of lives relieved from all vulgar necessities, playing as they pleased with art and money, with water and wood.