the thing in hand."

At that moment, the dark servant brought tea, and the fine oriental
china pleased Halcyone whose perceptions took in the texture of every
single thing she came in contact with.

The old man seemed to go into a reverie, he was quite silent while he
poured out the tea, forgetting to enquire her tastes as to cream and
sugar--he drank his black--and handed Halcyone a cup of the same.

She looked at him, her inquiring eyes full of intelligence and
understanding, and she realized at once that these trifles were not in
his consideration for the moment. So she helped herself to what she
wanted and sat down again in her armchair. She did not even rattle her
teaspoon. Priscilla often made noises which irritated her when she was
thinking. The old man came back to a remembrance of her presence at
last.

"Little girl," he said--"would you like to come here pretty often and
learn Greek, and about the Greeks?"

Halcyone bounded from her chair with joy.

"But of course I would!" she said. "And I am not stupid--not really
stupid Mademoiselle says, when I want to learn things."

"No--I dare say you are not stupid," the old man said. "So it is a
bargain then; I shall teach you about my friends the Greeks, and you
shall teach me about the green trees, and your friends the rabbits and
the beetles."

Then those instinctive good manners of Halcyone's came uppermost,
inherited, like her slender shape and balanced head, from that long line
of La Sarthe ancestors, and she thanked the old man with a quaint,
courtly, sweetly pedantic grace. Then she got up to go--

"I like being here--and may I come again to-morrow?" she said
afterwards. "I must go now or they will be disagreeable and perhaps make
difficulties."

The old man watched her as she curtsied to him and vaulted through the
window again, and on down the path, and through the hole in the paling,
without once turning round. Then he muttered to himself:

"A woman thing who refrains from looking back!--Yes, I fear she has a
soul."

Then he returned to his pipe and his Aristotle.

CHAPTER II

Halcyone struck straight across the park until she came to the beech
avenue, near the top, which ran south. The place had been nobly planned
by that grim old La Sarthe who raised it in the days of seventh Henry.
It stood very high with its terraced garden in the center of four
splendid avenues of oak, lime, beech and Spanish chestnut running east,
west, nort