"We never look so well as in May—the river is so full, and the swans are so white. Ah! I see Edgar has already taken Sir George to make friends with them."
And Letty, looking across the broad green lawn, saw the flash of a brimming river and a cluster of white swans, beside which stood her husband and a young man in a serge suit, who was feeding the swans with bread—Lord Ancoats, no doubt, the happy owner of all this splendour. To the left of their figures rose a stone bridge with a high, carved parapet, and beyond the river she saw green hills and woods against a radiant sky. Then, to her right was this wonderful yellowish pile of the old house. She began to admire and exclaim about it with a great energy and effusion, trying hard to say the correct and cultivated thing, and, in fact, repeating with a good deal of exactness what she had heard said of it by others.
Her hostess listened to her praises with a gentle smile. Gentleness, indeed, a rather sad gentleness, was the characteristic of Mrs. Allison. It seemed to make an atmosphere about her—her delicate blanched head and soft face, her small figure, her plain black dress, her hands in their white ruffles. Her friends called it saintliness. At any rate, it set her apart, giving her a peculiar ethereal dignity which made her formidable in society to many persons who were not liable to shyness. Letty from the beginning had felt her formidable.
Yet nothing could be kinder or simpler than her manner. In response to Letty's enthusiasms she let herself be drawn at once into speaking of her own love for the house, and on to pointing out its features.
"I am always telling these things to newcomers," she said, smiling. "And I am not clever enough to make variations. But I don't mind, somehow, how often I go through it. You see, this front is Tudor, and the south front is a hundred years later, and both of them, they say, are the finest of their kind. Isn't it wonderful that two men, a hundred years apart, should each have left such a noble thing behind him. One inspired the other. And then we—we poor moderns come after, and must cherish what they left us as we best can. It's a great responsibility, don't you think? to live in a beautiful house."
"I'm afraid I don't know much about it," said Letty, laughing; "we live in such a very ugly one."
Mrs. Allison looked sympathetic.
"Oh! but then, ugly ones have character; or they are pretty inside, or the people one loves have lived in them. That would make any place a House Beautiful. Aren't you near Perth?"
"Yes; and I am afraid you'll think me dreadfully discontented," said Letty, with one of her little laughing airs; "but there really isn't anything to make up in our barrack of a place. It's like a blackened brick set up on end at the top of a hill. And then the villages are so hideous."
"Ah! I know that coal-country," said Mrs. Allison, gravely—"and I know the people. Have you made friends with them yet?"