y to waste time indoors. He strolled to the
window, caught sight of a woman's figure among the bushes on the nearer
lawn, and lost no time in following. It was Cassandra, as he had
surmised, Cassandra in a knitted coat and cap of a soft rose colour
which matched the flush on her cheeks; her hands were thrust into her
pockets, and she nodded welcome to him with a girlish air. No girl
could have looked younger, or fresher, or more free from care, and she
felt as free as she looked. The guilty feeling of the morning had
disappeared, she had forgotten Teresa Mallison, and her claims, while
her husband's scepticism of the fact that any man should choose to spend
an afternoon with her for his own enjoyment, had stirred up latent
founts of coquetry. Peignton should enjoy himself! She had not yet
forgotten how to charm a man. She would charm him now so that his
afternoon in the spring garden should be a time to be remembered. She
need not have troubled. Grave or gay, nothing that she could have said
or done could possibly have failed to charm Peignton. But of that fact
she was, as yet, as ignorant as himself. The south windows of the Court
opened on to a stone terrace from which two separate flights of steps
gave access to a succession of gardens, sloping down to the wide stretch
of park. At the head of each stairway, and against the house in the
spaces between the windows stood stone vases filled with the gayest of
spring flowers. The fragrance of them filled the air, their colours
flared gloriously against the dull grey background, and threw into
striking contrast the green severity of the Dutch garden immediately
beneath. Here, later on in the year, the beds would exhibit gay
specimens of the latest development in carpet gardening, but in the
meantime they were bare, and the quaintly cut trees and shrubs had a
grim, almost funereal austerity. Lower down came a rose garden, with
pergolas leading in four separate avenues to a centre dome. In summer
the rose garden was a fairyland of beauty, but its time was not yet.
The gardeners were busy pruning and training, cleverly inserting new
branches among the old. Peignton noticed that though Cassandra gave the
men a pleasant greeting, she did not pause for any of the questioning,
the propositions, the consultations as to how and where, which true
garden lovers find irresistible under such circumstances. She led the
way to the lily beds, the ferneries, the herbaceous