“A sojourn, even for a short space, in such a remote region sounds extraordinarily unlike you. Perhaps it will have its compensations. You will deserve them, as I am sure you are doing this entirely on Mr. Elmore’s account. I wonder if you will chance to meet the Delanceys. From all I have heard Lady Mary must be a charming woman, and I once met her granddaughter, Rosamund Delancey. She is an exceedingly pretty girl. Maurice raved about her in a way that might have made a younger, and less experienced, woman than myself jealous.
“I heard an extraordinary rumour some weeks ago regarding the Delancey estate,—that an American claimant had turned up. Personally I gave little credence to the report. It savours too much of melodrama for this prosaic twentieth century. My informant had her facts pat enough, though. But it is too long a story to deal with in a letter, certainly too long when it is, as I believe, pure fiction. Anyhow there’s a missing document, a murder, and a wolf-hound connected with it. True Adelphi melodrama!
“I hope you may chance to meet the Delanceys....”
John glanced up at a small statue of Our Lady, which stood on his mantelpiece.
“Blessed Lady,” he said aloud in a tone at once respectful, fervent, and charmingly friendly, “join your prayers to her hopes.”
CHAPTER III
A MEETING
It was midday in the month of August, the sun ablaze upon wood and field. Only under the trees and hedges the shadows lay blue and still,—intensely, deeply blue, the warm restful blue of summer shadows. Overhead stretched another blue, a vault of brilliant azure, a vast cup-shaped dome, spreading downwards from the illimitable space above, to the hazy distant hills, to the far-off peacock-blue sea, sun-kissed and radiant. The warm earth breathed forth the languorous yet wide-eyed repose of perfect summer. Here was Nature at the maturest moment of her beauty,—the fields golden with full-eared corn, waiting in the richness of their dower for the first stroke of the sickle; the moors purple with heather, and rich with a hidden wealth of whortleberries; the hedges hung with clusters of scarlet brambleberries, even now tinged with the deeper hue of ripeness.
On a gate, set, after the general manner of gates in the west of England, between two hedges, one to the right and another to the left, sat our friend John. From the gate, a view stretched before him, which many an artist might have been excused for attempting to seize and transfer to canvas.
In the foreground stood a birch tree, a slender, dainty, silver-barked thing, rising straight out of a purple mass of heather. Its fairy lightness was backgrounded by a wood of firs, while past it, to the right, you got a stretch of undulating moorland across a valley, a strip of blue sea, and a hazy coast line of white cliffs.
“It really might be called a fine view,” said John aloud. And then he broke off, for a voice had sounded behind him,—a very young voice, a clear treble.