“Now look up,” he said.

She uttered an exclamation when she did so.  She was in a fairy dell thick with ferns, and at beautiful distances from each other incredibly splendid oaks spread and almost trailed their lovely giant branches.  The glow shining through and between them, the shadows beneath them, their great boles and moss-covered roots, and the stately, mellow distances revealed under their branches, the ancient wildness and richness, which meant, after all, centuries of cultivation, made a picture in this exact, perfect moment of ripening afternoon sun of an almost unbelievable beauty.

“There is nothing lovelier,” he said in a low voice, “in all England.”

Bettina turned to look at him, because his tone was a curious one for a man like himself.  He was standing resting on his gun and taking in the loveliness with a strange look in his rugged face.

“You—­you love it!” she said.

“Yes,” but with a suggestion of stubborn reluctance in the admission.

She was rather moved.

“Have you been keeper here long?” she asked.

“No—­only a few years.  But I have known the place all my life.”

“Does Lord Mount Dunstan love it?”

“In his way—­yes.”

He was plainly not disposed to talk of his master.  He was perhaps not on particularly good terms with him.  He led her away and volunteered no further information.  He was, upon the whole, uncommunicative.  He did not once refer to the circumstance of their having met before.  It was plain that he had no intention of presuming upon the fact that he, as a second-class passenger on a ship, had once been forced by accident across the barriers between himself and the saloon deck.  He was stubbornly resolved to keep his place; so stubbornly that Bettina felt that to broach the subject herself would verge upon offence.

But the golden ways through which he led her made the afternoon one she knew she should never forget.  They wandered through moss walks and alleys, through tangled shrubberies bursting into bloom, beneath avenues of blossoming horse-chestnuts and scented limes, between thickets of budding red and white may, and jungles of neglected rhododendrons; through sunken gardens and walled ones, past terraces with broken balustrades of stone, and fallen Floras and Dianas, past moss-grown fountains splashing in lovely corners.  Arches, overgrown with yet unblooming roses, crumbled in their time stained beauty.  Stillness brooded over it all, and they met no one.  They scarcely broke the silence themselves.  The man led the way as one who knew it by heart, and Bettina followed, not caring for speech herself, because the stillness seemed to add a spell of enchantment.  What could one say, to a stranger, of such beauty so lost and given over to ruin and decay.

“But, oh!” she murmured once, standing still, with indrawn breath, “if it were mine!—­if it were mine!” And she said the thing forgetting that her guide was a living creature and stood near.