And next they went into the great square room that had been Lionel Carvel’s, and there, too, was the roomy bed on which the old gentleman had lain with the gout, while Richard read to him from the Spectator.  One side of it looked out on the trees in Freshwater Lane; and the other across the roof of the low house opposite to where the sun danced on the blue and white waters of the Chesapeake.

“Honey,” said Virginia, as they stood in the deep recess of the window, “wouldn’t it be nice if we could live here always, away from the world?  Just we two!  But you would never be content to do that,” she said, smiling reproachfully.  “You are the kind of man who must be in the midst of things.  In a little while you will have far more besides me to think about.”

He was quick to catch the note of sadness in her voice.  And he drew her to him.

“We all have our duty to perform in the world, dear,” he answered.  “It cannot be all pleasure.”

“You—­you Puritan!” she cried.  “To think that I should have married a Puritan!  What would my great-great-great-great-grandfather say, who was such a stanch Royalist?  Why, I think I can see him frowning at me now, from the door, in his blue velvet goat and silverlaced waistcoat.”

“He was well punished,” retorted Stephen, “his own grandson was a Whig, and seems to have married a woman of spirit.”

“She had spirit,” said Virginia.  “I am sure that she did not allow my great-grandfather to kiss her—­unless she wanted to.”

And she looked up at him, half smiling, half pouting; altogether bewitching.

“From what I hear of him, he was something of a man,” said Stephen.  “Perhaps he did it anyway.”

“I am glad that Marlborough Street isn’t a crowded thoroughfare,” said Virginia.

When they had seen the dining room, with its carved mantel and silver door-knobs, and the ballroom in the wing, they came out, and Stephen locked the door again.  They walked around the house, and stood looking down the terraces,—­once stately, but crumbled now,—­where Dorothy had danced on the green on Richard’s birthday.  Beyond and below was the spring-house, and there was the place where the brook dived under the ruined wall,—­where Dorothy had wound into her hair the lilies of the valley before she sailed for London.

The remains of a wall that had once held a balustrade marked the outlines of the formal garden.  The trim hedges, for seventy years neglected, had grown incontinent.  The garden itself was full of wild green things coming up through the brown of last season’s growth.  But in the grass the blue violets nestled, and Virginia picked some of these and put them in Stephen’s coat.

“You must keep them always,” she said, “because we got them here.”

They spied a seat beside a hoary trunk.  There on many a spring day Lionel Carvel had sat reading his Gazette.  And there they rested now.  The sun hung low over the old-world gables in the street beyond the wall, and in the level rays was an apple tree dazzling white, like a bride.  The sweet fragrance which the day draws from the earth lingered in the air.