She was holding a plate in each hand towards a huge brown platter of baked rice-pudding, from which a footman was scooping a large spoonful, when a voice reached her ear over her shoulder:  ’Allow me to hold them for you.’

Christine turned, and recognized in the speaker the nephew of the entertainer, a young man from London, whom she had already met on two or three occasions.

She accepted the proffered help, and from that moment, whenever he passed her in their marchings to and fro during the remainder of the serving, he smiled acquaintance.  When their work was done, he improved the few words into a conversation.  He plainly had been attracted by her fairness.

Bellston was a self-assured young man, not particularly good-looking, with more colour in his skin than even Nicholas had.  He had flushed a little in attracting her notice, though the flush had nothing of nervousness in it—­the air with which it was accompanied making it curiously suggestive of a flush of anger; and even when he laughed it was difficult to banish that fancy.

The late autumn sunlight streamed in through the window panes upon the heads and shoulders of the venerable patriarchs of the hamlet, and upon the middle-aged, and upon the young; upon men and women who had played out, or were to play, tragedies or tragi-comedies in that nook of civilization not less great, essentially, than those which, enacted on more central arenas, fix the attention of the world.  One of the party was a cousin of Nicholas Long’s, who sat with her husband and children.

To make himself as locally harmonious as possible, Mr. Bellston remarked to his companion on the scene—­’It does one’s heart good,’ he said, ’to see these simple peasants enjoying themselves.’

‘O Mr. Bellston!’ exclaimed Christine; ’don’t be too sure about that word “simple”!  You little think what they see and meditate!  Their reasonings and emotions are as complicated as ours.’

She spoke with a vehemence which would have been hardly present in her words but for her own relation to Nicholas.  The sense of that produced in her a nameless depression thenceforward.  The young man, however, still followed her up.

‘I am glad to hear you say it,’ he returned warmly.  ’I was merely attuning myself to your mood, as I thought.  The real truth is that I know more of the Parthians, and Medes, and dwellers in Mesopotamia—­almost of any people, indeed—­than of the English rustics.  Travel and exploration are my profession, not the study of the British peasantry.’

Travel.  There was sufficient coincidence between his declaration and the course she had urged upon her lover, to lend Bellston’s account of himself a certain interest in Christine’s ears.  He might perhaps be able to tell her something that would be useful to Nicholas, if their dream were carried out.  A door opened from the hall into the garden, and she somehow found herself outside, chatting with Mr. Bellston on this topic, till she thought that upon the whole she liked the young man.  The garden being his uncle’s, he took her round it with an air of proprietorship; and they went on amongst the Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums, and through a door to the fruit-garden.  A green-house was open, and he went in and cut her a bunch of grapes.