complexion, a babyish chin, thick fair hair, and a countenance neither
reserved nor foolishly indiscreet. Tatham's physical eminence--and it was
undisputed--lay not in his plain, good-tempered face, but in the young
perfection of his athlete's form. Among spectacles, his mother, at least,
asked nothing better than to see him on horseback or swinging a
golf-club.

"How did you come?--through the Glendarra woods?" he asked of Lydia. The
delight in his eyes as he turned them upon her was already evident to his
mother.

Lydia assented.

"Then you saw the rhododendrons? Jolly, aren't they?"

Lydia replied with ardour. There is a place in the Glendarra woods, where
the oaks and firs fall away to let a great sheet of rhododendrons sweep
up from the lowland into a mountain boundary of gray crag and tumbling
fern. Rose-pink, white and crimson, the waves of colour roll among the
rocks, till Cumbria might seem Kashmir. Lydia's looks sparkled, as she
spoke of it. The artist in her had feasted.

"Won't you come and paint it?" said Tatham bending forward eagerly.
"You'd make a glorious thing of it. Mother could send a motor for you so
easily. Couldn't you, mother?"

"Delighted," said Lady Tatham, rather perfunctorily. "They are just in
their glory--they ought to be painted."

"Thank you so much!"--Lydia's tone was a little hurried--"but I have so