"Not—willingly."
Richard glanced at his grandfather. "I wonder just how much she would suffer," he suggested, with sparkling eyes. "Suppose we should drive in there and tell her we'd bought it!"
Mr. Kendrick turned to the figure in white at his side. The eyes of the old man and the young woman met with understanding, and the two smiled affectionately before the meeting was over. Richard looked on approvingly. But he complained.
"I'd like one like that, myself," said he. "Robin has looked at me only three times this morning, and once was when we met, for purposes of identification!"
He had a glance of his own, then, and apparently it went to his head, for he became more animated than ever in calling the party's attention to each piece, of property passed by.
"These are all modern," he commented presently. "There's something about your really old house that can't be copied. Your own home, Robin—that's the type of antique beauty that's come to seem to me more desirable than any other. Isn't there one along here somewhere that reminds one of it?"
"There's the General Armitage place," Roberta said. "That must be close by, now. It used to be far out in the country. It was built by the same architect who built ours. General Armitage and my great-grandfather were intimate friends—they were in the Civil War together."
"Here it is." Ruth pointed it out eagerly. "I always like to go by it, because it looks quite a little like ours, only the grounds are much larger, and it has a wonderful old garden behind it. Mother has often said she wished she could transplant the Armitage garden bodily, now that the house has been closed so long. She says the old gardener is still here, and looks after the garden—or his grandsons do."
"Shall we drive in and see it?" proposed Richard. "A garden like that ought to have some one to admire it now and then."
He gave the order, and the car rolled in through the old stone gateway. The place, though of a noble old type, was far from a pretentious one, and there was no lodge at the gate, as with most of its neighbours. The house was no larger than the comfortable home of the Gray family, but its closed blinds and empty white-pillared portico gave it a deserted air. The grounds about it were not indicative of present day, fastidious landscape gardening, but suggested an old-time country gentleman's estate, sufficiently kept up to prevent wild and alien growth, though needing the supervision of an interested owner to suggest beneficial changes here and there.