“That is better than nobility—­though I have pride in my own.  I wish papa thought so.  Yet he has both himself.”

“The fine soul!  For fifty years he has stood square to adversity with a smile on his face.  Could I ever achieve that?  Already I cry out on poverty; because I want an unencumbered field for work, and—­yes, one other trifle.”

“One other trifle, George?”

He took Plancine’s face between his hands and looked very lovingly into her eyes.

“I think I did the old man too much honour,” he said.  “You nestling of eighteen—­what credit to scout misfortune with such a bird at one’s side!”

“Ah! but papa is sixty-nine and the bird but eighteen.”

“And eighteen years of heaven are a good education in happiness.”

So they coo’d, these two.  The June scents of the little garden were wafted all about them.  The moon had come up out of the sea, and, finding a trellis of branches over their heads, hung their young brows with coronals of shadowy leaves, like the old dame she was, rummaging in her trinket box for something for her favourites.

In the dimly-luminous parlour (that smelt of folios and warm coffee) of the little dark house in the background, the figure of papa, poring at the table over geological maps, was visible.

Fifty years ago an emigre, denounced, proscribed, and escaped from the ruin of a shattered society:  here, in ’49, a stately, large-boned man, placidly enjoying the consciousness of a serene dignity maintained at the expense of much and prolonged self-effacement—­this was papa.

Grey hair, thinning but slightly near the temples; grey moustache and beard pointed de bouc; flowered dressing-gown girdled about a heart as simple as a child’s—­this was papa, papa who grubbed over his ordnance surveys while the young folks outside whispered of the stars.

Right beneath them—­the latter—­a broad gully of the hills went plunging precipitously, all rolled with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft blue lias and the very roof ridges of King’s Cobb, whose walls and chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay that swept the land here like a scythe.

Plancine’s village, a lofty appanage or suburb of this little seaboard town at the hill-foot, seemed rather the parent stock from which the other had emancipated itself.  For all down the steep slope that fled from Upper to King’s Cobb was flung a debris of houses that, like the ice-fall of a glacier, would appear to have broken from the main body and gone careering into the valley below.

It was in point of fact, however, but a subordinate hamlet—­a hanging garden for the jaded tourist in the dog days, when his soul stifled in the oven of the sea-level cliffs—­an eyrie for Plancine, and for George, the earnest painter, a Paradise before the fall.

And now says George, “We have talked all round your confession, and still I wait to give you absolution.”