A grove of trees half-girdled the house, and this, together with the sheltering upward trend of the downs on one side of it, tempered the violence of the fierce winds which sometimes swept the coast-line even in summer.

Behind the house, under the lee of the rising upland, lay the gardens of Mallow, witness to the loving care of generations.  Stretches of lawn, coolly green and shaven, sloped away from a terrace which ran the whole length of the house, meeting the gravelled drive as it curved past the house-door.  Beyond lay dim sweet alleys, over-arched by trees, and below, where a sudden dip in the configuration of the land admitted of it, were grassy terraces, gay with beds of flowers, linked together by short flights of grass-grown steps.

“I can’t understand why you spend so much time in stuffy old London, Kitty, when you have this heavenly place to come to.”

Nan spoke from a nest of half-a-dozen cushions heaped together beneath the shade of a tree.  Here she was lounging luxuriously, smoking innumerable Turkish cigarettes, while Kitty swung tranquilly in a hammock close by.  Penelope had been invisible since lunch time.  They had all been down at Mallow the better part of a month, and she and Ralph Fenton quite frequently absented themselves, “hovering,” as Barry explained, “on the verge of an engagement.”

“My dear, the longer I stay in town, the more thoroughly I enjoy the country when we come here.  I get the quintessence of enjoyment by treating Mallow as a liqueur.”

Nan laughed.  There was a faint flavour of bitterness in her laughter.

“Practically most of our good times in this world are only to be obtained in the liqueur form.  The gods don’t make a habit of offering you a big jug of enjoyment.”

“If they did, you’d be certain to refuse it because you didn’t like the shape of the jug!” retorted Kitty.

Nan smiled whole-heartedly.

“What a miserable, carping, discontented creature I must be!”

“I’ll swear that’s not true!” An emphatic masculine voice intervened, and round the corner of the clump of trees beneath which the two girls had taken refuge, swung a man’s tall, well-setup figure clad in knickerbockers and a Norfolk coat.

“Good gracious, Roger, how you made me jump!” And Kitty hurriedly lowered a pair of smartly-shod feet which had been occupying a somewhat elevated position in the hammock.

“I’m sorry.  How d’you do, Kit?  And how are you, Miss Davenant?” answered the new-comer.

The alteration in his voice as he addressed Nan was quite perceptible to anyone well-versed in the symptoms of the state of being in love, and his piercing light-grey eyes beneath their shaggy, sunburnt brows—­fierce, far-visioned eyes that reminded one of the eyes of a hawk—­softened amazingly as they rested upon her charming face.

“Oh, we’re quite all right, thanks,” she answered.  “That is, when people don’t drop suddenly from the clouds and galvanise us into action this warm weather.”