As he came to her under the quaint trellised arch, “I always feel like a croquet ball going through the hoop,” he said.

“But the ball is always driven,” she said.

“Oh, I dare say it has the illusion of freewill.  Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves.  The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the castle with holy joy.”

She came imperceptibly closer to him.  “Then you don’t think any of us move of ourselves?”

“One or two of us in each generation.  They make the puppets dance.”

“You admire Bismarck, I see.”

“Yes.  A pity he didn’t emigrate to your country, like so many Germans.”

“Do you think we need him?  But he couldn’t have been President.  You must be born in America.”

“True.  Then I shall remain on here.”

“You’re terrible ambitious, Mr. Bassett.”

“Yes, terrible,” he repeated mockingly.

“Then come and help me pick blackberries,” she said, and caught him by his own love of the unexpected.  They left the formal garden, and came out into the rabbit-warren, and toiled up and down hillocks in search of ripe bushes, paying, as Walter said, “many pricks to the pint.”  And when Amber urged him to scramble to the back of tangled bushes, through coils of bristling briars, “You were right,” he laughed; “this is terrible ambitious.”  The best of the blackberries plucked, Amber began a new campaign against mushrooms, and had frequent opportunities to rebuke his clumsiness in crumbling the prizes he uprooted.  She knelt at his side to teach him, and once laid her deft fingers instructively upon his.

And just at that moment he irritatingly discovered a dead mole, and fell to philosophising upon it and its soft, velvet, dainty skin—­as if a girl’s fingers were not softer and daintier!  “Look at its poor little pale-red mouth,” he went on, “gaspingly open, as in surprise at the strange great forces that had made and killed it.”

“I dare say it had a good time,” said Amber, pettishly.

After the harvest had been carried indoors they scarcely exchanged a word till she found him watching the bees the next morning.

“Are you interested in bees?” she inquired in tones of surprise.

“Yes,” he said.  “They are the most striking example of Nature’s Bismarckism—­her habit of using her creatures to work her will through their own. Sic vos non vobis.”

“I learnt enough Latin at College to understand that,” she said; “but I don’t see how one finds out anything by just watching them hover over their hives.  I’ve never even been able to find the queen bee.  Won’t you come and see what beautiful woods there are behind the house?  Lady Chelmer is walking there, and I ought to be joining her.”

“You ought to be taking her an umbrella,” he said coldly.  Amber looked up at the sky.  Had it been blue, she would have felt it grey.  As it was grey, she felt it black.