“Is this Glenavelin?” she cried.  “Oh, what a place to live in!”

“Yes, it’s very pretty, dear.”  And Lady Manorwater, who possessed half a dozen houses up and down the land, patted her guest’s arm and looked with pleasure on the flushed girlish face.

Two hours later, Alice, having completed dressing, leaned out of her bedroom window to drink in the soft air of evening.  She had not brought a maid, and had refused her hostess’s offer to lend her her own on the ground that maids were a superfluity.  It was her desire to be a very practical young person, a scorner of modes and trivialities, and yet she had taken unusual care with her toilet this evening, and had spent many minutes before the glass.  Looking at herself carefully, a growing conviction began to be confirmed—­that she was really rather pretty.  She had reddish-brown hair and—­a rare conjunction—­dark eyes and eyebrows and a delicate colour.  As a small girl she had lamented bitterly the fate that bad not given her the orthodox beauty of the dark or fair maiden, and in her school days she had passed for plain.  Now it began to dawn on her that she had beauty of a kind—­the charm of strangeness; and her slim strong figure had the grace which a wholesome life alone can give.  She was in high spirits, curious, interested, and generous.  The people amused her, the place was a fairyland and outside the golden weather lay still and fragrant among the hills.

When she came down to the drawing-room she found the whole party assembled.  A tall man with a brown beard and a slight stoop ceased to assault the handle of a firescreen and came over to greet her.  He had only come back half an hour ago, he explained, and so had missed her arrival.  The face attracted and soothed her.  Abundant kindness lurked in the humorous brown eyes, and a queer pucker on the brow gave him the air of a benevolent despot.  If this was Lord Manorwater, she had no further dread of the great ones of the earth.  There were four other men, two of them mild, spectacled people, who had the air of students and a precise affected mode of talk, and one a boy cousin of whom no one took the slightest notice.  The fourth was a striking figure, a man of about forty in appearance, tall and a little stout, with a rugged face which in some way suggested a picture of a prehistoric animal in an old natural history she had owned.  The high cheek-bones, large nose, and slightly protruding eyes had an unfinished air about them, as if their owner had escaped prematurely from a mould.  A quantity of bushy black hair—­which he wore longer than most men-enhanced the dramatic air of his appearance.  It was a face full of vigour and a kind of strength, shrewd, a little coarse, and solemn almost to the farcical.  He was introduced in a rush of words by the hostess, but beyond the fact that it was a monosyllable, Alice did not catch his name.

Lord Manorwater took in Miss Afflint, and Alice fell to the dark man with the monosyllabic name.  He had a way of bowing over his hand which slightly repelled the girl, who had no taste for elaborate manners.  His first question, too, displeased her.  He asked her if she was one of the Wisharts of some unpronounceable place.