“Perhaps you could not have been capable of appreciating her—­fifteen years ago,” suggested Honora.  And, lest he might misconstrue her remark, she avoided his eyes.

“Perhaps,” he admitted.  “But suppose I have found her now, when I know the value of things.”

“Suppose you should find her now—­within a reasonable time.  What would you do?”

“Marry her,” he exclaimed promptly.  “Marry her and take her to Grenoble, and live the life my father lived before me.”

She did not reply, but rose, and he followed her to the shaded corner of the porch where they usually sat.  The bundle of yellow-stained envelopes he had brought were lying on the table, and Honora picked them up mechanically.

“I have been thinking,” she said as she removed the elastics, “that it is a mistake to begin a biography by the enumeration of one’s ancestors.  Readers become frightfully bored before they get through the first chapter.”

“I’m beginning to believe,” he laughed, “that you will have to write this one alone.  All the ideas I have got so far have been yours.  Why shouldn’t you write it, and I arrange the material, and talk about it!  That appears to be all I’m good for.”

If she allowed her mind to dwell on the vista he thus presented, she did not betray herself.

“Another thing,” she said, “it should be written like fiction.”

“Like fiction?”

“Fact should be written like fiction, and fiction like fact.  It’s difficult to express what I mean.  But this life of your father deserves to be widely known, and it should be entertainingly done, like Lockhart, or Parton’s works—­”

An envelope fell to the floor, spilling its contents.  Among them were several photographs.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “how beautiful!  What place is this?”

“I hadn’t gone over these letters,” he answered.  “I only got them yesterday from Cecil Grainger.  These are some pictures of Grenoble which must leave been taken shortly before my father died.”

She gazed in silence at the old house half hidden by great maples and beeches, their weighted branches sweeping the ground.  The building was of wood, painted white, and through an archway of verdure one saw the generous doorway with its circular steps, with its fan-light above, and its windows at the side.  Other quaint windows, some of them of triple width, suggested an interior of mystery and interest.

“My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Chiltern, built it,” he said, “on land granted to him before the Revolution.  Of course the house has been added to since then, but the simplicity of the original has always been kept.  My father put on the conservatory, for instance,” and Chiltern pointed to a portion at the end of one of the long low wings.  “He got the idea from the orangery of a Georgian house in England, and an English architect designed it.”

Honora took up the other photographs.  One of them, over which she lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall.  Behind the wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a path between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess, a stone seat.