‘I shall arm myself with a knife,’ said Mr. Hale:  ’the days of eating fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me.  I must pare it and quarter it before I can enjoy it.’

Margaret made a plate for the pears out of a beetroot leaf, which threw up their brown gold colour admirably.  Mr. Lennox looked more at her than at the pears; but her father, inclined to cull fastidiously the very zest and perfection of the hour he had stolen from his anxiety, chose daintily the ripest fruit, and sat down on the garden bench to enjoy it at his leisure.  Margaret and Mr. Lennox strolled along the little terrace-walk under the south wall, where the bees still hummed and worked busily in their hives.

’What a perfect life you seem to live here!  I have always felt rather contemptuously towards the poets before, with their wishes, “Mine be a cot beside a hill,” and that sort of thing:  but now I am afraid that the truth is, I have been nothing better than a cockney.  Just now I feel as if twenty years’ hard study of law would be amply rewarded by one year of such an exquisite serene life as this—­such skies!’ looking up—­’such crimson and amber foliage, so perfectly motionless as that!’ pointing to some of the great forest trees which shut in the garden as if it were a nest.

’You must please to remember that our skies are not always as deep a blue as they are now.  We have rain, and our leaves do fall, and get sodden:  though I think Helstone is about as perfect a place as any in the world.  Recollect how you rather scorned my description of it one evening in Harley Street:  “a village in a tale.’

‘Scorned, Margaret That is rather a hard word.’

’Perhaps it is.  Only I know I should have liked to have talked to you of what I was very full at the time, and you—­what must I call it, then?—­spoke disrespectfully of Helstone as a mere village in a tale.’

‘I will never do so again,’ said he, warmly.  They turned the corner of the walk.

‘I could almost wish, Margaret——­’ he stopped and hesitated.  It was so unusual for the fluent lawyer to hesitate that Margaret looked up at him, in a little state of questioning wonder; but in an instant—­from what about him she could not tell—­she wished herself back with her mother—­her father—­anywhere away from him, for she was sure he was going to say something to which she should not know what to reply.  In another moment the strong pride that was in her came to conquer her sudden agitation, which she hoped he had not perceived.  Of course she could answer, and answer the right thing; and it was poor and despicable of her to shrink from hearing any speech, as if she had not power to put an end to it with her high maidenly dignity.