"And, oh, Dick!" she cried, "if only Mr. Falconer could be here! How he would enjoy it! He's always talking of the country, and how much good it would do him!"
"Poor beggar—yes!" said Dick, with a nod of sympathy. "I say, Nell, why shouldn't we ask him to pay us a visit?"
Nell grew radiant at the suggestion; then looked doubtful.
"But may we?" she asked. "This isn't our lodge, Dick; though I have begun to feel as if it were."
"Nonsense!" said Dick emphatically. "The agent placed it absolutely at our disposal. A nice state of things if we couldn't ask a friend! Have Britons—especially engineers—become slaves? I pause for a reply. No? Good! Then I'll write him a line that will fetch him down—with his fiddle! What a pity we haven't got a piano!"
Nell laughed.
"Yes, we could put it in the sitting room, and look at it through the window; for there certainly wouldn't be room inside for it and us together!"
Dick wrote the next day, and Falconer walked up and down his bare and narrow room, with the letter in his hand, his thin face flushing and then paling with longing and doubt. To be in the country, in the same house with her! And yet—would it not be wiser to refuse? His love grew large enough when it was only fed on memory; it would grow beyond restraint in such close companionship. Better to refuse and remain where he was than to go near her, and so increase the store of agony which the final parting would bring him. And so, after the manner of weak man, he sat down and wrote a line, accepting.
Dick stole half an hour to go with Nell to meet him at the station, and Dick's hearty greeting and Nell's smile brought the blood to his face and made the thin hand he gave them tremble.
"The fact is, we couldn't get on without the violin—brought it? That's all right. Because if you hadn't, you'd be sent back for it, young man. Pretty country, isn't it? All belongs to our young swell. I say 'our,' because we feel as if we'd got a kind of share in him, as if he belonged to us. You'll hear nothing but 'Lord Angleford,' 'the earl,' all day long here; and you'll speedily come to our conviction, that the earth, or this particular corner of it, with all that it contains, man, woman, and child, birds, beasts, and fishes, was made for his lordship's special behoof. Nice little place—kind of fishing box, isn't it?" he said, nodding to the vast pile as it came in sight. "That's where I spend my laborious days, putting on water for his lordship to drink and wash with, and setting up electric light for his lordship to shave himself by, though I suppose his lordship's valet does that. And what price the lodge? For this is our residence pro tem."