own expense.
She would light-heartedly make town-bred folk walk twenty miles or bear
the toil of infinite drives. But this was after lunch; before, her
guests might do as they pleased. Lord Manorwater went off to see some
tenant; Arthur, after vain efforts to decoy Alice into a fishing
expedition, went down the stream in a canoe, because to his fool's head
it seemed the riskiest means of passing the time at his disposal; Bertha
and her sister were writing letters; the spectacled people had settled
themselves below shady trees with voluminous papers and a pile of books.
Alice alone was idle. She made futile expeditions to the library, and
returned with an armful of volumes which she knew in her heart she would
never open. She found the deepest and most comfortable chair and placed
it in a shady place among beeches. But she could not stay there, and
must needs wander restlessly about the gardens, plucking flowers and
listlessly watching the gardeners at their work.

Lunch-time found this young woman in a slightly irritable frame of mind.
The cause direct and indirect was Mr. Stocks, who had found her alone,
and had saddled her with his company for the space of an hour and a
half. His vein had been _badinage_ of the serious and reproving kind, and
the girl had been bored to distraction. But a misspent hour is soon
forgotten, and the sight of her hostess's cheery face would have
restored her to good humour had it not been for a thought which could
not be exorcised. She knew of Lady Manorwater's reputation as an
inveterate matchmaker, and in some subtle way the suspicion came to her
that that goddess had marked herself as a quarry. She found herself
next Mr. Stocks at meals, she had already listened to his eulogy from
her hostess's own lips, and to her unquiet fancy it seemed as if the
others stood back that they two might be together. Brought up in an
atmosphere of commerce, she was perfectly aware that she was a desirable
match for an embryo politician, and that sooner or later she would be
mistress of many thousands. The thought was a barbed vexation. To Mr.
Stocks she had been prepared to extend the tolerance of a happy
aloofness; now she found that she was driven to dislike him with all the
bitterness of unwelcome proximity.

The result of such thoughts was that after lunch she disregarded her
hostess's preparations and set out for a long hill walk. Like all
perfectly healthy people, much exercise was as welcome to her