When the young ladies brought Mr. Logger back to luncheon the visitors were gone, but Lady Latimer mentioned that they had been there, and she gave Mr. Logger a short account of them:  “Mr. Harry Musgrave is reading for the bar.  He took honors at Oxford, and if his constitution will stand the wear and tear of a laborious, intellectual life, great things may be expected from him.  But unhappily he is not very strong.”  Mr. Logger shook his head, and said it was the London gas.  “Mr. Christie is a son of our village wheelwright, himself a most ingenious person.  Mr. Danberry found him out, and spoke those few words of judicious praise that revealed the young man to himself as an artist.  Mr. Danberry was staying with me at the time, and we had him here with his sketches, which were so promising that we encouraged him to make art his study.  And he has done so with much credit.”

“Christie? a landscape-painter? does a portrait now and then?  I have met him at Danberry’s,” said Mr. Logger, whose vocation it was to have met everybody who was likely to be mentioned in society.  “Curious now:  Archdeacon Topham was the son of a country carpenter:  headstrong fellow—­took a mountain-walk without a guide, and fell down a crevasse, or something.”

Mr. Cecil Burleigh arrived the next day to luncheon.  In the afternoon the whole party walked in the Forest.  Lady Latimer kept Dora at her elbow, and required Mr. Logger’s opinion and advice on a new emigration scheme that she was endeavoring to develop.  Bessie Fairfax was thus left to Mr. Cecil Burleigh, and they were not at a loss for conversation.  Bessie was feeling quite gay and happy, and talked and listened as cheerfully as possible.  The gentleman was rather jaded with the work of the session, and showed it in his handsome visage.  He assumed that Miss Fairfax was so far in his confidence as to be interested in the high themes that interested himself, and of these he discoursed until his companion inadvertently betrayed that she was capable of abstracting her mind and thinking of something else while seeming to give him all her polite attention.  He was then silent—­not unthankfully.

Their walk took them first round by the wheelwright’s and afterward by the village.  Lady Latimer loved to entertain and occupy her guests, even those who would have preferred wider margins of leisure.  On the green in front of the wheelwright’s they found little Christie seated under a white umbrella, making a sketch of his father’s house and the shed.  A group of sturdy children had put themselves just in the way by a disabled wagon to give it life.

“I am doing it to please my mother,” said the artist in reply to Lady Latimer’s inquiry if he was going to make a finished picture of it.  He went on with his dainty touches without moving.  “I must not lose the five-o’clock effect of the sun through that tall fir,” he explained apologetically.

“No; continue, pray, continue,” said my lady, and summoned her party to proceed.