Bernadette looked a little pale and seemed rather tired—"run down after the season," she had explained to Esther Norton Ward when that lady commented on her appearance—but Arthur was too joyfully excited, by meeting her again and by his first view of Hilsey, to notice fine shades. It was true that he had suffered a momentary hesitation about coming—a passing spasm of conscience or ambition induced by the great case of Tiddes v. the Universal Omnibus Company, Ltd.—but that was all over with the sight of Bernadette and of his stock's ancestral home. To see her there was to see the jewel in its proper setting, or (to adopt Joe Halliday's hyperbole) the angel in her own paradise. As they stepped out on the lawn in front of the old house, he exclaimed, "It's beautiful, and it fits you just perfectly! You were made for one another!"
She pursed up her lips for a minute, and then laughed. "Drink it in!" she said, jeering at his enthusiasm, and perhaps at something else; the idea of an innate harmony between herself and her husband's house seemed, to say the least, far-fetched.
Whatever might be the case as to its mistress, Hilsey deserved his praises. An old manor house, not very large, but perfect in design and unimpaired by time or change, it stood surrounded by broad lawns, bordered on the south side (towards which the principal rooms faced) by a quick-running river. The pride of the garden lay in the roses and the cedar trees; amongst all the wealth of beauty these first caught the eye. Within the house, the old oak was rich in carving; the arms of the Lisles and of their brides, escutcheons and mottoes, linked past and present in an unbroken continuity. Grave gentlemen, and beauties, prim or provocative, looked down from the panels. As he saw the staid and time-laden perfection, the enshrined history, the form and presentment of his ancestors, a novel feeling came to birth in Arthur Lisle, a sense of family, of his own inalienable share in all this though he owned none of it, of its claim on him. Henceforth, wherever he dwelt, he would know this, in some way, for his true home. He confessed to his feelings laughingly: "Now I understand what it is to be a Lisle of Hilsey!"
"Imperishable glory!" But she was rather touched. "I know. I think I felt it too when Godfrey brought me here first. It is—awfully charming."
"I don't care for show-places as a rule. They expect too much of you. But this doesn't. It's just—well, appealing and insinuating, isn't it?"
"It's very genteel."
"Oh yes, it's unquestionably very genteel too!" he laughed.
The incomparable home and the incomparable cousin—his mind wedded them at once.
"It was a stroke of genius that made Godfrey choose you to—to reign here!"
Her smile was the least trifle wry now. What imp of perversity made the boy say all the things which were not, at this moment, very appropriate?