The view which met their eyes was exquisite.
Beyond the perfect stately garden, with its quaint clipped yews and masses of spring flowers and velvet lawns, there stretched the vast park with its splendid oaks and browsing deer. It was a possession which any man could feel proud to own.
John slipped his arm round her waist and drew her to him.
"Amaryllis," he said, and his voice vibrated, "to-day I am going to show you everything I love here at Ardayre—because I want you to love it all, too. You are of the family, so it must mean something to you, dear."
Amaryllis kindled with re-awakening hope.
"Indeed, it will mean everything to me, John."
He kissed her forehead and murmured something about her dressing quickly, and that he would wait for her there in the cedar room. And when she returned in about a quarter of an hour in the neatest country clothes, he placed her hand on his arm and led her down the great stairs and on through the hall into the picture gallery.
It was a wonderful place of green silk and chestnut wainscoting, and all the walls of its hundred feet of length were hung with canvases of value—portraits principally of those Ardayres who had gone on. Face after face looked down on Amaryllis of the same type as John's and her own—the brown hair and eyes of grey or blue. Some were a little fairer, some a little darker, but all unmistakably stamped "Ardayre."
John pointed out each individual to her, while she hung fondly on his arm, from some doubtful crude fourteenth century wooden panels of Johns and Denzils, on to Benedict in a furred Henry VII. gown. Then came Henrys and Denzils in Elizabethan armour and puffed white satin, and through Stuart and Commonwealth to Stuart again, and so to William and Mary numbers of Benedicts, and lastly to powdered Georgian James' and Regency Denzils and Johns. And the name Amaryllis recurred more than once in stately dame or damsel, called after that fair Amaryllis of Elizabeth's days who had been maid of honour to the virgin Queen, and had sonnets written to her nut brown locks by the gallants of her time.
"How little the women they married seem to have altered the type!" the young living Amaryllis exclaimed, when they came nearly to the end. "It goes on Ardayre, Ardayre, Ardayre, ever since the very first one. Oh! John, if we ever have a son he ought to be even more so—you and I being of the same blood—" and then she hesitated and blushed crimson. This was the first time she had ever spoken of such a thing.