The guests gathered on the circle of smooth-shaven grass that in the centre made a space around a fountain, with a gleaming water nymph.  A broad grass pathway led them to the house, so that guests emerging from it arrived in rather spectacular fashion—­well seen, against the ivied walls of the castle, to the unfair advantage, as usual, of grace and good looks.

Before hostess or neighbours appeared, however, Mr. Delorme and a certain Gerald Tatham, Lady Tatham’s brother-in-law, had the green circle to themselves.  Gerald Tatham was one of the uninvited guests.  He considered himself entitled to descend on Duddon twice a year, and generally left it having borrowed money of his nephew, in elaborate forgetfulness of a similar transaction twelve months earlier still undischarged.  He was married, but his wife did not pay visits with him.  Victoria greatly preferred her—­plain and silent as she was—­to her husband; but realizing what a relief it must be to a woman to get such a man off her hands as often as possible, she never pressed her to come to Duddon.  Meanwhile Gerald Tatham passed as an agreeable person, well versed in all those affairs of his neighbours which they would gladly have kept to themselves, and possessed of certain odd pockets of knowledge, sporting or financial, which helped him to earn the honest or doubtful pennies on which his existence depended.

Delorme and he got on excellently.  Gerald respected the painter as a person whose brush, in a strangely constituted world, was able to supply him with an income which even the sons of land or commerce might envy; and secretly despised him for a lack of grandfathers, for his crop of black curls, his southern complexion and his foreign birth.  Delorme thought Gerald an idler of no account, and perceived in him the sure signs of a decadence which was rapidly drawing the English aristocratic class into the limbo of things that were.  But Gerald was an insatiable hawker of gossip; and a fashionable painter, with an empire among young and pretty women, must keep himself well stocked with that article.

So the two walked up and down together, talking pleasantly enough.  Presently Delorme, sweeping a powerful hand before him, exclaimed on the beauty of the castle and its surroundings.

“Yes—­a pretty place,” said Gerald, carelessly, “and, for once, money enough to keep it up.”

“Your nephew is a lucky fellow.  Why don’t they marry him.”

“No hurry!  When it does come off my sister-in-law will do something absurd.”

“Something sentimental?  I’ll bet you she doesn’t!  Democracy is all very well—­except when it comes to marriage.  Then even idealists like Lady Tatham knock under.”

“I wish you may be right.  Anyway, she won’t send him to New York!”

“No need!  Blue blood—­impoverished!—­that’s my forecast.”

Gerald smiled—­ungenially.

“Victoria would positively dislike an heiress.  Jolly easy to take that sort of line—­on forty thousand a year!  But as to birth, the family, in my opinion, has a right to be considered.”