“You drove away a cow!” she exclaimed.  “It is only because I am rather idiotic about cows that I happened to be afraid.  I am sure that it was a perfectly harmless animal.”

“On the contrary,” he assured her seriously, “there was something in the eye of that cow which almost inspired me with fear.  Did you notice the way it lashed its tail?”

“Absurd!”

“At least,” he protested, “you cannot find it absurd that I prefer to sit here with you in the shadow of your lilac trees, to trudging any further along that dusty road?”

“You haven’t the slightest right to be here at all,” she reminded him.  “I didn’t even invite you to come in.”

He sighed.

“Women have so little sense of consequence,” he murmured.  “When you came in through that gate without saying good-bye, I naturally concluded that I was expected to follow, especially as you had just pointed this out to me as being your favorite seat.”

Again she laughed.  Then she stopped suddenly and looked at him.  He really was a somewhat difficult person to place.

“If I hadn’t a very irritable parent to consider,” she declared, “I think I should ask you to tea.”

Burton looked very sad.

“You need not have put it into my head,” he objected gently.  “The inn smells so horribly of the beer that other people have drunk.  Besides, I have come such a long way—­just for a glimpse of you.”

It seemed to her like a false note.  She frowned.

“That,” she insisted, “is ridiculous.”

“Is it?” he murmured.  “Don’t you ever, when you walk in your gardens, with only that low wall between you and the road, wonder whether any of those who pass by may not carry away a little vision with them?  It is a beautiful setting, you know.”

“The people who pass by are few,” she answered.  “We are too far off the beaten track.  Only on Saturdays and holiday times there are trippers, fearful creatures who pick the bracken, walk arm in arm, and sing songs.  Tell me why you look as though you were dreaming, my preserver?”

“Look along the lane,” he said softly.  “Can’t you see them—­the wagonette with the tired horse drawn up just on the common there—­a tired, dejected-looking horse, with a piece of bracken tied on to his head to keep the flies off?  There were three men, two women and a little boy.  They drank beer and ate sandwiches behind that gorse bush there.  They called one another by their Christian names, they shouted loud personal jokes, one of the women sang.  She wore a large hat with dyed feathers.  She had black, untidy-looking hair, and her face was red.  One of the men made a noise with his lips as an accompaniment.  There was the little boy, too—­a pasty-faced little boy with a curl on his forehead, who cried because he had eaten too much.  One of the men sat some distance apart from the others and stared at you—­stared at you for quite a long time.”