he
pleasure of the thing by giving a few brief, emphatic orders to her
steward, instead of personally superintending every detail of the
servants' ball and the tenants' dinner.

Mrs. Ogilvie's directions were probably made in less than an hour, and
transmitted to Mr. Miller's capacious pocket-book when he came to her
boudoir to receive instructions one autumn morning. When he had left,
Mrs. Ogilvie quitted her writing-table, by which she had been sitting,
and walked to the window of her room and stood idly by it, her graceful
figure outlined against the pane. Before her stretched the great
gardens in an aching formality of borders and devices. Viewed from a
height, and with her near-sighted eyes, they presented an appearance of
a piece of elaborate stitchwork on a green worsted ground. The
fountains, with their punctual fall of spray, might have been a device
in shells and beads in the centre of each design. Beyond the gardens
there was a mass of woods, all dim greens and bright golds; but even
the woods were touched with formality, and the foresters of the place
had lopped away every unsightly branch from the beeches and oaks.
Probably there may have been homely corners in the gardens and grounds
which Peter had discovered as a child; but Mrs. Ogilvie, when she
walked, kept to the prim paths of the terrace and the garden, where
every pebble seemed to have its proper place, in full view of the
windows of the house.

'It has always been a prison to me--always,' she murmured to herself,
oblivious of the fact that no one more than she would have missed a
luxurious environment and a stately setting to her own personality.
Mrs. Ogilvie often imagined that she would have liked a small house;
but there is no doubt that she would have quitted it in disgust the
first time that the odour of dinner came up the back stairs. She
believed that a large staff of servants was merely a burden; but she
would have felt at a loss had she been obliged to wait on herself even
for an hour. As she looked now at the gardens in front of her, and
away to the woods beyond, and to the great stretches of greenhouses and
conservatories to southward, she thought how irksome they were, how
unnecessary, and how little pleasure they gave.

'Magnificence is always dull,' she thought, 'and yet people are
impressed by it! They not only value themselves by what they have;
they actually value others according to their possessions, and respect
a man