The porch serves too as a reception-room, the vines being thick and the occupants completely hidden from view.  Here Lucy often spreads a small table, especially when Max Feilding drives over in his London drag from Beach Haven on Barnegat beach.  On these occasions, if the weather is warm, she refreshes him with delicate sandwiches and some of her late father’s rare Scotch whiskey (shelved in the cellar for thirty years) or with the more common brands of cognac served in the old family decanters.

Of late Max had become a constant visitor.  His own ancestors had made honorable records in the preceding century, and were friends of the earlier Cobdens during the Revolution.  This, together with the fact that he had visited Yardley when Lucy was a girl—­on his first return from Paris, in fact—­and that the acquaintance had been kept up while he was a student abroad, was reason enough for his coming with such frequency.

His drag, moreover, as it whirled into Yardley’s gate, gave a certain air of eclat to the Manor House that it had not known since the days of the old colonel.  Nothing was lacking that money and taste could furnish.  The grays were high-steppers and smooth as satin, the polished chains rattled and clanked about the pole; the body was red and the wheels yellow, the lap-robe blue, with a monogram; and the diminutive boy studded with silver buttons bearing the crest of the Feilding family was as smart as the tailor could make him.

And the owner himself, in his whity-brown driving-coat with big pearl buttons, yellow gloves, and gray hat, looked every inch the person to hold the ribbons.  Altogether it was a most fashionable equipage, owned and driven by a most fashionable man.

As for the older residents of Warehold, they had only words of praise for the turnout.  Uncle Ephraim declared that it was a “Jim Dandy,” which not only showed his taste, but which also proved how much broader that good-natured cynic had become in later years.  Billy Tatham gazed at it with staring eyes as it trundled down the highway and turned into the gate, and at once determined to paint two of his hacks bright yellow and give each driver a lap-robe with the letter “T” worked in high relief.

The inmates of Yardley were not quite so enthusiastic.  Martha was glad that her bairn was having such a good time, and she would often stand on the porch with little Ellen’s hand in hers and wave to Max and Lucy as they dashed down the garden road and out through the gate, the tiger behind; but Jane, with that quick instinct which some women possess, recognized something in Feilding’s manner which she could not put into words, and so held her peace.  She had nothing against Max, but she did not like him.  Although he was most considerate of her feelings and always deferred to her, she felt that any opposition on her part to their outings would have made no difference to either one of them.  He asked her permission, of course, and she recognized the courtesy, but nothing that he ever did or said overcame her dislike of him.