"You must excuse my sea manners. I should have used more circumlocution, but they don't put much polish on us on board."
"No, they don't, and you boast of it, hence that phrase. You never hear a soldier apologizing for his 'army manners'!"
"Speaks well for their modesty! Well, Kate, where are you bound for? You are not rigged up in that way merely to coast about here."
"I meant to walk round the spring woods."
"And as Dashwood has sloped perhaps I may sail in consort. The walks won't be swept, of course, and that dainty scarlet petticoat will look like an old hunting-coat."
But a gardener asserting that the men had been at work since daylight, the cousins departed on their ramble.
A gravel walk a mile round encircled the inner ring of a wood left wild, except where rides were cut, showing vistas into the park beyond. Here and there it was cleared into a rosary, with a summer-house, a Dutch garden with a fountain, a glade with a fish-pond, etc. The trees were magnificent, and many a foreign specimen was represented, while the shimmering tints of grey-green, from their great variety, were of shades innumerable. Sometimes the bordering turf became wider, and flowering shrubs grew each side of the walk,—an intoxicating spot in spring, when the wild flowers carpeted the woods, and the bird artistes, returning from starring in other lands, recommenced their "popular concerts."
Even now, in winter dress, its attractions were but changed. The lichen-covered kings of the forest revealed their bold limbs undisguised by foliage, the feathery birch showed its delicate tracery against the clear winter sky, and Dutton sighed as he gazed on that fair demesne, and thought how hard it would be to give it up.
Kate's thoughts had apparently wandered in the same direction, for she said abruptly,—"What a happy fellow you are, Harry, to be heir to all this!" But she was thinking more of the first-rate style in which it was kept up, and the magnificent, comfortable house, than of its picturesque features.
"There's many a slip," said Harry, moodily, between the whiffs of his pipe. "We all know Uncle Bromley, Kate."