"Keeper of the Wild Beasts' Asylum, Torres Hall," murmured the said Roscoria, irreverently. "I have been deputed to arrange another set; shall we four play?"
Tregurtha gave vent to a muffled cheer, and the quartet marched (with some unseemly haste, lest other men should take their bishoprics) to the best ground, and there began. Tregurtha and Roscoria were noted players; together they were, in Devonshire at least, invincible. In a single, Tregurtha had the best of it.
The set was exciting. At first the two sides won game for game. Lyndis, as a tennis-player, was grace personified. She looked so lovely and moved so lightly that it seemed a marvel why hers was not always the winning side. Roscoria, too, exerted every muscle, and writhing about with the cleverness of a lively cobra, ought to have done wonders, but he tried too hard, and lost. Tregurtha, with less grace, had a longer reach and a greater power of hard hitting, so he turned to his partner about the fourth game, saying, "We will win this set, I think," and proceeded to do so. His partner was a capital player, shirked no balls, and had a prompt little way with a back-hander, which looked spirited and was useful. It was she who won the set (said Tregurtha), for it was she who returned Roscoria's last serve, with the twist on, by a malicious little slant just over the net, where the ball fell almost a yard before the feet of the goddess Lyndis, who beamed with gracious impotence upon it.
The baffled pair, Roscoria and Miss Villiers, strolled to an arbor, and there sat talking. It might have been ten minutes that they sat there—as Roscoria thought it was—or it might have been an hour and ten minutes to boot. Anyhow, it was heaven. There sat Lyndis Villiers in a low wicker chair, all embowered in fragrant honeysuckle, and looking herself like pink eglantine with her gold hair and soft rose cheeks. The admiring sunlight played on her dress, all snowy white, save where a pretty caprice had moved her to place a bunch of glittering buttercups. There she rested, one hand round a branch of honeysuckle, her eyes still, kind, and peaceful; her voice sweet and calm, speaking her very thoughts, and those such wise and pure ones! There was Lyndis, the Ideal realized, and there opposite sat Roscoria, clasping his knee in his hands in deep preoccupation, not himself at all, nor conscious of himself, but "a self aloof, that gazed and listened like a soul in dreams, weaving the wondrous tale it marvels at." He only knew from time to time, as her voice ceased, or her head was turned away for a moment, that he had come under one of those divine madnesses which the gods send upon men; that life grew more wonderful every moment, and that ever after he should be able to say—I have once been happy.
Meanwhile Tregurtha and his partner of the white face and dark eyes were eating strawberries in an adjacent hayfield. It was pleasant there also, and the damsel, for all her grave looks, was playful, and conversation was uninterrupted. "Tell me a sea story," she asked, after a little desultory persiflage had been exchanged; and Tregurtha settled himself on a large haycock and began to recount his own adventures in various storms and casualties on the ocean, just as he told them to Roscoria's boys at night. And as he did so, his blue eyes kindling, and his hands closing and unclosing with the excitement of memory and the thought of the wild sea wind, he caught full sight of the blue-black eyes of his hearer, who had come nearer and was watching and listening to him with parted lips. She reminded him of a woman he had known years ago in Spain, who died; and those eyes struck a sharp pain to his heart, so that he finished his story with his hand over his brow to keep them from him. So, as he did not look again at her, Rosetta quietly finished all the strawberries, for she was, as yet, very young.
A loud, impatient halloo aroused them both, as a stout, warlike, flurried, elderly gentleman came puffing indignantly through the tumbled hay (most like a threshing machine), much encumbered by a large feminine shawl, which he carried on his arm, and shouting to Rosetta:
"Why, why, dash it, my love, I call this insubordination, you know. Didn't I tell you an hour you should have and no more? And how long do you suppose you've kept the horses waiting? I can tell you, madam, you're the only human being who dare keep Admiral Sir John Villiers' carriage and himself waiting in this way. How d'ye do, sir? I'm glad to make your acquaintance. Sailor, I see. Of course! didn't I know what the tattooing on your wrist meant? Got an anchor on mine, sir. Confound your impudence, miss, what are you laughing at? Oh! the shawl—stuck to my coat-button, has it? Well, and if it has; have you no reverence, you saucy minx? Put it round your neck, treasure. I hate a woman who catches cold!"
Thus was Rosetta swept off from the glances of her first admirer by Admiral Sir John Villiers, the owner of Braceton Park, renowned as the most awkward customer in Devonshire.