end. Below the house the ground sloped very steeply away, and
the terrace was a remarkably high one; from the balusters to the
sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty feet. Seen from below,
the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of
brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification--a
castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out across airy
depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the
foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees,
lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the
park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at
the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the
farther side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope,
chequered with cultivation. Looking up the valley, to the right,
one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.

The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled
about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry
Wimbush had begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those
ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might
be thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as
long as he could remember. In all those years his pale, rather
handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale
grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer--
unageing, calm, serenely without expression.

Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world
by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny
Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-
and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled