“That is a good idea,” he answered.  “Where should you begin?”

She replied quite seriously, though he could have imagined some girls rather simpering over the question as a casual joke.

“One would begin at the fences,” she said.  “Don’t you think so?”

“That is practical.”

“That is where I shall begin at Stornham,” reflectively.

“You are going to begin at Stornham?”

“How could one help it?  It is not as large or as splendid as this has been, but it is like it in a way.  And it will belong to my sister’s son.  No, I could not help it.”

“I suppose you could not.”  There was a hint of wholly unconscious resentment in his tone.  He was thinking that the effect produced by their boundless wealth was to make these people feel as a race of giants might—­even their women unknowingly revealed it.

“No, I could not,” was her reply.  “I suppose I am on the whole a sort of commercial working person.  I have no doubt it is commercial, that instinct which makes one resent seeing things lose their value.”

“Shall you begin it for that reason?”

“Partly for that one—­partly for another.”  She held out her hand to him.  “Look at the length of the shadows.  I must go.  Thank you, Lord Mount Dunstan, for showing me the place, and thank you for undeceiving me.”

He held the side gate open for her and lifted his cap as she passed through.  He admitted to himself, with some reluctance, that he was not content that she should go even yet, but, of course, she must go.  There passed through his mind a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself.  It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one place to another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in them so long—­the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness wrecked.  She had shown it in the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes.  Oh, yes, she had understood and cared, American as she was!  She had felt it all, even with her hideous background of Fifth Avenue behind her.

When he had spoken it had been in involuntary response to an emotion in herself.

So he stood, thinking, as he for some time watched her walking up the sunset-glowing road.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PARTICULAR INCIDENT