Walderhurst himself, if he was human. She was standing, leaning lightly
against the trunk of an ilex-tree, and a snow-white Borzoi was standing
close to her, resting his long, delicate head against her gown,
encouraging the caresses of her fair, stroking hand. She was in this
attractive pose when Lady Maria turned in her seat and said:

"There's Walderhurst."

The man who had driven himself over from the station in the cart was
coming towards them across the grass. He was past middle life and plain,
but was of good height and had an air. It was perhaps, on the whole,
rather an air of knowing what he wanted.

Emily Fox-Seton, who by that time was comfortably seated in a cushioned
basket-chair, sipping her own cup of tea, gave him the benefit of the
doubt when she wondered if he was not really distinguished and
aristocratic-looking. He was really neither, but was well-built and
well-dressed, and had good grayish-brown eyes, about the colour of his
grayish-brown hair. Among these amiably worldly people, who were not in
the least moved by an altruistic prompting, Emily's greatest capital
consisted in the fact that she did not expect to be taken the least
notice of. She was not aware that it was her capital, because the fact
was so wholly a part of the simple contentedness of her nature that she
had not thought about it at all. The truth was that she found all her
entertainment and occupation in being an audience or a spectator. It did
not occur to her to notice that, when the guests were presented to him,
Lord Walderhurst barely glanced at her surface as he bowed, and could
scarcely be said to forget her existence the next second, because he had
hardly gone to the length of recognising it. As she enjoyed her
extremely nice cup of tea and little buttered scone, she also enjoyed