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, north and south. And four gates in different stages of
dilapidation gave entrance through a broken wall of stone to a circular
drive which connected all the avenues giving access to the house, a
battered, irregular erection of gray stone.