Bran was to be seen nosing low down at the window; and alternately lifting two huge white paws in his futile anxiety to enter the room.

‘Then I dare say John is in the garden,’ Leonora exclaimed, with sudden animation, glad to be able to dismiss the faint uneasy suspicion which had begun to form in her mind that John meant after all to avoid Arthur Twemlow.  ‘Would you like to look at the garden?’ she demanded, half rising, and lifting her brows to a pretty invitation.

‘Very much indeed,’ he replied, and he jumped up with the impulsiveness of a boy.

‘It’s quite warm,’ she said, and thanked Harry for opening the window for them.

‘A fine severe garden!’ he remarked enthusiastically outside, after he had descanted to Bran on Bran’s amazing perfections, and the dog had greeted his mistress.  ‘A fine severe garden!’ he repeated.

‘Yes,’ she said, lifting her skirt to cross the lawn.  ’I know what you mean.  I wouldn’t have it altered for anything, but many people think it’s too formal.  My husband does.’

’Why!  It’s just English.  And that old wall! and the yew trees!  I tell you——­’

She expanded once more to his appreciation, which she took to herself; for none but she, and the gardener who was also the groom, and worked under her, was responsible for the garden.  But as she displayed the African marigolds and the late roses and the hardy outdoor chrysanthemums, and as she patted Bran, who dawdled under her hand, she looked furtively about for John.  She hoped he might be at the stables, and when in their tour of the grounds they reached the stables and he was not there, she hoped they would find him in the drawing-room on their return.  Her suspicion reasserted itself, and it was strengthened, against her reason, by the fact that Arthur Twemlow made no comment on John’s invisibility.  In the dusk of the spruce stable, where an enamelled name-plate over the manger of a loose box announced that ‘Prince’ was its pampered tenant, she opened the cornbin, and, entering the loose-box, offered the cob a handful of crushed oats.  And when she stood by the cob, Twemlow looking through the grill of the door at this picture which suggested a beast-tamer in the cage, she was aware of her beauty and the beauty of the animal as he curved his neck to her jewelled hand, and of the ravishing effect of an elegant woman seen in a stable.  She smiled proudly and yet sadly at Twemlow, who was pulling his heavy moustache.  Then they could hear an ungoverned burst of Milly’s light laughter from the drawing-room, and presently Milly resumed her interrupted song.  Opposite the outer door of the stable was the window of the kitchen, whence issued, like an undertone to the song, the subdued rattle of cups and saucers; and the glow of the kitchen fire could be distinguished.  And over all this complex domestic organism, attractive and efficient in its every manifestation, and vigorously alive now in the smooth calm of the English Sunday, she was queen; and hers was the brain that ruled it while feigning an aloof quiescence.  ’He is a romantic man; he understands all that,’ she felt with the certainty of intuition.  Aloud she said she must fasten up the dog.