If Toni said little during that magic excursion, it was not shyness alone which sealed her lips; and although he cast a look now and then at his companion, Owen was too considerate to break into her raptures with questioning words.
Only when they were approaching their destination did he begin to point out the various features of the landscape.
"That village over there is Willgate, noted for an old Saxon arch in its church. My mother used to go over there to evening service, I remember. She liked it better than our own church—the one you can just see peeping between the trees. The village—Willowhurst, I mean—lies round this bend. It's quite a rural-looking place, when you remember that after all it is not an hour's journey from Waterloo."
The car glided round the bend as he spoke, and Toni saw the village lying in the afternoon sunshine, which winked back from the windows of the little houses, built in a queer, old-fashioned manner round a small green. There was a pleasant, old-world look about the place which was oddly charming; and Toni was quite sorry when the car left the little green behind. But in another minute they were on a stretch of white road bordered by a high wall, behind which tall trees stood like sentinels; and Toni caught her breath as Owen said, in a voice which he tried, vainly, to keep steady:
"See, there's Greenriver—my home—beyond the trees."
They had reached the high gates in the wall, and when once they had entered and were rolling up the broad avenue Toni gazed eagerly in the direction he had indicated.
Greenriver was a stately old place enough. It had been built in the days of Queen Bess; and was just such a house as that in which Justice Shallow might have entertained Falstaff—a long grey building with a porch in the centre and a huge gable at either end—a house with deep-mullioned windows and large stacks of chimney-pots.
The house faced the river, to which it led by a terrace of velvety turf, broken here and there by gay flower-beds; while the real gardens lay at the other side of the building. Here beauty and dignity had joined hands, as it were, to preserve the stately loveliness of the grounds, under whose tall elms many a joyous company must have roamed when the river was the highway of elegance and fashion, and great barges floated down the Thames bearing Royal personages reclining on their couches covered with cloth of gold. Here on summer evenings the nightingales sang to the roses for which the gardens were famous; and for centuries the big white owls had hooted from their nests in the tree-tops, or flown, like pale ghosts, across the dusky paths.
The grounds were indeed noted all along the river for the magnificence of their green, velvety lawns, the size and beauty of the flowers in parterre and bed, the wonderful completeness—and in some cases the antiquity—of the contents of the famous herbaceous border; and Toni never forgot the sensation of awe which overwhelmed her as she realized that this glorious place belonged to the man beside her.
She spoke a little shyly as the car came to a standstill at the foot of the steps leading to the big door.