out, accompanied at the piano, talked to the neglected
visitors, walked in the rain, and after the arrival of the post usually
had conferences with her hostess, during which she stroked her chin and
looked familiarly responsible. It was her peculiarity that people were
always saying things to her in a lowered voice. She had all sorts of
acquaintances and in small establishments sometimes wrote the _menus_.
Great ones, on the other hand, had no terrors for her--she had seen too
many. No one had ever discovered whether any one else paid her. People
only knew what _they_ did.

If Lady Agnes had in the minor key discussed with her the propriety of a
union between the mistress of Harsh and the hope of the Dormers this
last personage could take the circumstance for granted without
irritation and even with cursory indulgence; for he was got unhappy now
and his spirit was light and clear. The summer day was splendid and the
world, as he looked at it from the terrace, offered no more worrying
ambiguity than a vault of airy blue arching over a lap of solid green.
The wide, still trees in the park appeared to be waiting for some daily
inspection, and the rich fields, with their official frill of hedges, to
rejoice in the light that smiled upon them as named and numbered acres.
Nick felt himself catch the smile and all the reasons of it: they made
up a charm to which he had perhaps not hitherto done justice--something
of the impression he had received when younger from showy "views" of
fine country-seats that had pressed and patted nature, as by the fat
hands of "benches" of magistrates and landlords, into supreme
respectability and comfort. There were a couple of peacocks on the
terrace, and his eye was caught by the gleam of the swans on a distant
lake, where was also a little temple on an island; and these objects
fell in with his humour, which at another time might have been ruffled
by them as aggressive triumphs of the conventional.

It was certainly a proof of youth and health on his part that his
spirits had risen as the plot thickened and that after he had taken his
jump into the turbid waters of a contested election he had been able to
tumble and splash not only without a sense of awkwardness but with a
considerable capacity for the frolic. Tepid as we saw him in Paris he
had found his relation to his opportunity surprisingly altered by his
little journey across the Channel, had seen things in a new perspective
and breat