Caroline was one of these. She was no older than he, but had seen so much more of the world and its inhabitants that her feeling towards him was almost maternal.
He was not like the young men whom she had met in such shoals in London ball-rooms and in country houses, not one of whom, however they might differ in character and tastes, but had done and known many of the things that she had. Bradby was the son of a clergyman, and had left his provincial Grammar-school for a stool in a provincial bank, to be released from it after four years of unhappy confinement for the country life after which his soul had always hankered. The country was a passion with him, and Caroline had penetrated some of his depths at an early stage, when the rest of the family were only in the state of finding him uncommonly heavy in hand, because his upbringing had not trained him to respond to the easy intimacy which they offered to all whom they thought worthy of it, and had offered to him on his introduction to them under Worthing's wing. Caroline, sweet and kind to all who seemed to need helping in the world, had taken more trouble about him than the rest, but they had all come to accept him by this time for what he was. It was no longer awkward to have him sitting silent while talk flowed high all about him; they knew him too well to be obliged to drag him into it out of politeness, or for one of them to detach herself to talk to him. And it was only in talk that he was backward. If there was anything to do he was a stand-by,—clever and capable and interested. All of them liked him very well, but only Caroline had come to be unaffected by his dissimilarity from type.
He was tall and loosely built, with large, strong hands, and, it must be confessed, with unusually large feet. His hair was not well brushed, and looked as if it could not be. His features were indeterminate, but he had large, dark eyes which somehow redeemed them. His clothes were unobtrusive, but whatever he wore he never looked well-dressed. Among the smart young men of the Graftons' large circle of friends, who came down to shoot at Abington or to spend week-ends there, and even those who were not smart but belonged obviously to the same class, he seemed always out of place. This was somewhat of an annoyance to Beatrix, who was apt to complain that there was no reason why he should so persistently take a back seat, considering that they had done all they could to make a friend of him. But it did not annoy Caroline. She had seen once or twice young men among their visitors who did not live and move wholly on the surface of things find something in common with him. He was her protégé. She did not even want to see him 'smartened up,' as Beatrix, commenting upon his unaccented appearance, had sometimes suggested as a process that would improve him.
The rock-garden, fashioned the previous year out of a disused stone quarry across a paddock from the garden, was full of interest, in this its second flowering season, and attracted visits at all hours of the day. Maurice Bradby had worked hard with hands and brains at its construction, and knew more about what was growing in it than any of its owners. He had had few opportunities of acquiring garden knowledge in the provincial town in which most of his life had been spent, but he sucked in and assimilated such knowledge without effort, and added to it by close observation, and to a lesser extent by study of his subject. All subjects that had to do with nature found this eager response in him, and Worthing, a countryman by birth and upbringing, had said more than once that he had never had a pupil so easy to teach.
Bradby found his voice the moment they were clear of the tennis lawn. "What did you mean about the system being wrong just now?" he asked.
She looked up at him with a smile. "I don't think I said it was wrong, did I?" she said. "I said that it wanted the right people to make it work."
He seemed to be considering this, and she said, half jestingly, "I know you think everything is right in the country."
"It's right for me," he said simply. "I suppose it's right for you, too, isn't it?"
"Yes; but then look how you and I are placed."