‘I love my friends,’ she replied.

‘You tempt me to envy those who are numbered among them.’

‘They are not many.’

’They should be grateful.!

‘You have some acquaintance with them all.’

‘And an enemy?  Had you ever one?  Do you know of one?’

’Direct and personal designedly?  I think not.  We give that title to those who are disinclined to us and add a dash of darker colour to our errors.  Foxes have enemies in the dogs; heroines of melodramas have their persecuting villains.  I suppose that conditions of life exist where one meets the original complexities.  The bad are in every rank.  The inveterately malignant I have not found.  Circumstances may combine to make a whisper as deadly as a blow, though not of such evil design.  Perhaps if we lived at a Court of a magnificent despot we should learn that we are less highly civilized than we imagine ourselves; but that is a fire to the passions, and the extreme is not the perfect test.  Our civilization counts positive gains—­unless you take the melodrama for the truer picture of us.  It is always the most popular with the English.—­ And look, what a month June is!  Yesterday morning I was with Lady Dunstane on her heights, and I feel double the age.  He was fond of this wild country.  We think it a desert, a blank, whither he has gone, because we will strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that but the bursting of the eyeballs.’

Dacier assented:  ‘There’s no use in peering beyond the limits.’

‘No,’ said she; ’the effect is like the explaining of things to a dull head—­the finishing stroke to the understanding!  Better continue to brood.  We get to some unravelment if we are left to our own efforts.  I quarrel with no priest of any denomination.  That they should quarrel among themselves is comprehensible in their wisdom, for each has the specific.  But they show us their way of solving the great problem, and we ought to thank them, though one or the other abominate us.  You are advised to talk with Lady Dunstane on these themes.

She is perpetually in the antechamber of death, and her soul is perennially sunshine.—­See the pretty cottage under the laburnum curls!  Who lives there?’

‘His gamekeeper, Simon Rofe.’

’And what a playground for the children, that bit of common by their garden-palings! and the pond, and the blue hills over the furzes.  I hope those people will not be turned out.’

Dacier could not tell.  He promised to do his best for them.

‘But,’ said she, ‘you are the lord here now.’

’Not likely to be the tenant.  Incomes are wanted to support even small estates.’

‘The reason is good for courting the income.’

He disliked the remark; and when she said presently: 

‘Those windmills make the landscape homely,’ he rejoined:  ’They remind one of our wheeling London gamins round the cab from the station.’