“It’s so still you can hear it,” he said once, stopping in a velvet, moss-covered path.  “Seems like you’ve got quiet shut up here, and you’ve turned it on till the air’s thick with it.  Good Lord, think of little old Broadway keeping it up, and the L whizzing and thundering along every three minutes, just the same, while we’re standing here!  You can’t believe it.”

It would have gone hard with him to describe to them the value of his enjoyment.  Again and again there came back to him the memory of the grandmother who wore the black net cap trimmed with purple ribbons.  Apparently she had remained to the last almost contumaciously British.  She had kept photographs of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort on her bedroom mantelpiece, and had made caustic, international comparisons.  But she had seen places like this, and her stories became realities to him now.  But she had never thought of the possibility of any chance of his being shown about by the lord of the manor himself—­lunching, by gee! and talking to them about typewriters.  He vaguely knew that if the grandmother had not emigrated, and he had been born in Dunstan village, he would naturally have touched his forehead to Mount Dunstan and the vicar when they passed him in the road, and conversation between them would have been an unlikely thing.  Somehow things had been changed by Destiny—­perhaps for the whole of them, as years had passed.

What he felt when he stood in the picture gallery neither of his companions could at first guess.  He ceased to talk, and wandered silently about.  Secretly he found himself a trifle awed by being looked down upon by the unchanging eyes of men in strange, rich garments—­in corslet, ruff, and doublet, velvet, powder, curled love locks, brocade and lace.  The face of long-dead loveliness smiled out from its canvas, or withheld itself haughtily from his salesman’s gaze.  Wonderful bare white shoulders, and bosoms clasped with gems or flowers and lace, defied him to recall any treasures of Broadway to compare with them.  Elderly dames, garbed in stiff splendour, held stiff, unsympathetic inquiry in their eyes, as they looked back upon him.  What exactly was a thirty shilling bicycle suit doing there?  In the Delkoff, plainly none were interested.  A pretty, masquerading shepherdess, with a lamb and a crook, seemed to laugh at him from under her broad beribboned straw hat.  After looking at her for a minute or so, he gave a half laugh himself—­but it was an awkward one.

“She’s a looker,” he remarked.  “They’re a lot of them lookers—­not all—­but a fair show——­”

“A looker,” translated Mount Dunstan in a low voice to Penzance, “means, I believe, a young women with good looks—­a beauty.”

“Yes, she is a looker, by gee,” said G. Selden, “but—­but—­” the awkward half laugh, taking on a depressed touch of sheepishness, “she makes me feel ’way off—­they all do.”