the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses, shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an intolerable affliction.  ‘I speak rather as an invalid,’ she admitted; ’I conjure up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the night beneath one’s windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the landscape; hideous accidents too.  They will be wholesale and past help.  Imagine a collision!  I have borne many changes with equanimity, I pretend to a certain degree of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us.  They will not see the England we have seen.  It will be patched and scored, disfigured . . . a sort of barbarous Maori visage—­England in a New Zealand mask.  You may call it the sentimental view.  In this case, I am decidedly sentimental:  I love my country.  I do love quiet, rural England.  Well, and I love beauty, I love simplicity.  All that will be destroyed by the refuse of the towns flooding the land—­barring accidents, as Lukin says.  There seems nothing else to save us.’

Redworth acquiesced.  ‘Nothing.’

‘And you do not regret it?’ he was asked.

’Not a bit.  We have already exchanged opinions on the subject.  Simplicity must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman.  As for beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption.  A bushelful of nonsense is talked pro and con:  it always is at an innovation.  What we are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is all.’

‘And establishing a new field for the speculator.’

’Yes, and I am one, and this is the matter I wanted to discuss with you, Lady Dunstane,’ said Redworth, bending forward, the whole man devoted to the point of business.

She declared she was complimented; she felt the compliment, and trusted her advice might be useful, faintly remarking that she had a woman’s head:  and ‘not less’ was implied as much as ‘not more,’ in order to give strength to her prospective opposition.

All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table.  He might within a year have a tolerable fortune:  and, of course, he might be ruined.  He did not expect it; still he fronted the risks.  ‘And now,’ said he, ’I come to you for counsel.  I am not held among my acquaintances to be a marrying man, as it’s called.’

He paused.  Lady Dunstane thought it an occasion to praise him for his considerateness.

‘You involve no one but yourself, you mean?’ Her eyes shed approval.  ’Still the day may come . . .  I say only that it may:  and the wish to marry is a rosy colouring . . . equal to a flying chariot in conducting us across difficulties and obstructions to the deed.  And then one may have to regret a previous rashness.’

These practical men are sometimes obtuse:  she dwelt on that vision of the future.

He listened, and resumed:  ’My view of marriage is, that no man should ask a woman to be his wife unless he is well able to support her in the comforts, not to say luxuries, she is accustomed to.’  His gaze had wandered to the desk; it fixed there.  ‘That is Miss Merion’s writing,’ he said.