on she saw and avoided a swamp in which she had once earned a
scolding from her nurse by filling her stockings with mud. Then she
found herself in a long avenue of green turf, running east and west,
and apparently endless. This seemed the most delightful of all her
possessions, and she had begun to plan a pavilion to build near it,
when she suddenly recollected that this must be the elm vista of
which the privacy was so stringently insisted upon, by her invalid
tenant at the Warren Lodge. She fled into the wood at once, and,
when she was safe there, laughed at the oddity of being a trespasser
in her own domain. She made a wide detour in order to avoid
intruding a second time; consequently, after walking for a quarter
of an hour, she lost herself. The trees seemed never ending; she
began to think she must possess a forest as well as a park. At last
she saw an opening. Hastening toward it, she came again into the
sunlight, and stopped, dazzled by an apparition which she at first
took to be a beautiful statue, but presently recognized, with a
strange glow of delight, as a living man.

To so mistake a gentleman exercising himself in the open air on a
nineteenth-century afternoon would, under ordinary circumstances,
imply incredible ignorance either of men or statues. But the
circumstances in Miss Carew's case were not ordinary; for the man
was clad in a jersey and knee-breeches of white material, and his
bare arms shone like those of a gladiator. His broad pectoral
muscles, in their white covering, were like slabs of marble. Even
his hair, short, crisp, and curly, seemed like burnished bronze in
the evening light. It came into Lydia's mind that she had disturbed
an antique god in his sylvan haunt. The fancy was only momentary;
for she perceived that there was a third person present; a man
impossible to associate with classic divinity. He looked like a well