“I meant to walk round the spring woods.”

“And as Dashwood has sloped perhaps I may sail in consort.  The walks won’t be swept, of course, and that dainty scarlet petticoat will look like an old hunting-coat.”

But a gardener asserting that the men had been at work since daylight, the cousins departed on their ramble.

A gravel walk a mile round encircled the inner ring of a wood left wild, except where rides were cut, showing vistas into the park beyond.  Here and there it was cleared into a rosary, with a summer-house, a Dutch garden with a fountain, a glade with a fish-pond, etc.  The trees were magnificent, and many a foreign specimen was represented, while the shimmering tints of grey-green, from their great variety, were of shades innumerable.  Sometimes the bordering turf became wider, and flowering shrubs grew each side of the walk,—­an intoxicating spot in spring, when the wild flowers carpeted the woods, and the bird artistes, returning from starring in other lands, recommenced their “popular concerts.”

Even now, in winter dress, its attractions were but changed.  The lichen-covered kings of the forest revealed their bold limbs undisguised by foliage, the feathery birch showed its delicate tracery against the clear winter sky, and Dutton sighed as he gazed on that fair demesne, and thought how hard it would be to give it up.

Kate’s thoughts had apparently wandered in the same direction, for she said abruptly,—­“What a happy fellow you are, Harry, to be heir to all this!” But she was thinking more of the first-rate style in which it was kept up, and the magnificent, comfortable house, than of its picturesque features.

“There’s many a slip,” said Harry, moodily, between the whiffs of his pipe.  “We all know Uncle Bromley, Kate.”

“Do you know,” said she, mysteriously, “I hear he actually keeps his eyes, so to speak, on that grand-daughter in Canada.  The agent who pays the annuity reports to him.”

“The deuce!—­you make me quite hot, Kate.  Are you inventing just out of chaff?”

“No, honour bright.  Mamma was talking about it; and seems he heard rather an unpleasant rumour the other day.”

“Come, that’s better.  What has the young woman been a-doing of?”

“Run away, or something.  I overheard mamma telling old Lady Calvert; but they nodded and winked and interjected I couldn’t clearly make it out.  I was writing a letter at the davenport, and in the glass opposite observed them.  I don’t generally burden my mind much with the conversation of my elders, but something in the alertness of their attitudes and flutter of their caps made me contemplatively bite my pen and—­attend.  A breach of confidence on the maternal side, I should surmise, for she declined satisfying my laudable curiosity when I pumped her afterwards, and seemed alarmed at my having heard anything.”

“I had no idea,” exclaimed Harry, “that he took the slightest interest in that girl; and, hang it all, Kate, she is the rightful heir.  Perhaps he looks on her as a second string in case I don’t carry out all his arbitrary wishes.”