it hadn't been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in
England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at
home. But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated;
it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale--and might
besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci.
It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little
creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy,
and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being
painted in water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go
on in chapters and volumes. The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary
extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the
place delightfully still, private, proper to itself. "My wife must
be somewhere about," Mark Ambient said as we went in. "We shall
find her perhaps--we've about an hour before dinner. She may be in
the garden. I'll show you my little place."

We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have
called them, which extended into the rear. They covered scarce
three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked
and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and
little flights of steps--mossy and cracked were these--which
connected the different parts with each other. The limits of the
place, cleverly dissimulated, were muffled in the great verdurous
screens. They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the
further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently
made out from afar a little group. "Ah there she is!" said Mark
Ambient; "and she has got the boy." He noted that last fact in a
slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken. I
wasn't fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and
I afterwards understood it.