There was only one street, a sleepy, winding, white down road, which ran between mossy barns and deep-thatched cottages under the Amberley Wall. The castle was older than Amberley House, yet Amberley House was a respectable three hundred years, and had been all that time the home of countless Vernys. It had not retreated into relentless privacy, as most old English homes have done; it stood, with its wide porch, stoutly upon the moss-grown cobbles.
But it was better than its promises. If it had no park, there lay behind its frontage not a park, but a garden—a garden that fitted in with nature, only to excel it.
Lady Verny loved two things, her garden and her son; but she had been able to do most with her garden. There were terraces that swung from point to point above the long, blue valley; there was a lawn hemmed in by black yew hedges, over which the downs piled themselves, bare and high, with only the clouds beyond them. There was a sunken rose-garden, with rough-tiled pathways leading to a lake with swans. Three hundred years had helped Lady Verny with the lawn, but the herbaceous borders had been her own affair. Julian, crossing the lawn toward her, was the same strange mixture of her hand and time; and she had always known that when she had done all she could for Julian and the garden, she would have to give both up. With all their difficulties, their beauties, and their sullen patches, they would pass into the hands of some young and untried person unchosen by herself.
The person had been chosen now. Marian was already at Amberley for a week-end, and knowing that Julian was expected, she had left Lady Verny sitting by the tea-table under the yew hedge and gone up toward the downs.
Julian would like this; he would not wish his bride to meet him half-way. He would delight in Marian's aloofness; her deliberate and delicate coldness would seem to him like the bloom upon a grape. But the coldness of a future daughter-in-law is not the quality which most endears her to a mother.
"Julian," Lady Verny said to herself as he approached her, "will make a very trying lover. If he is absorbed in Marian, he will interfere with her; and if he is absorbed in anything else, he will ignore her. He needs a great deal of judicious teasing. Marian takes herself too seriously to see the fun of Julian; she only sees the fun of sex. She was quite right to go up to the downs. It'll amuse him to pursue her now, but it'll bore him later; and in the end he'll find out that she doesn't keep him off because she's got so much to give, but because she's so afraid of giving anything."
"Where's Marian?" asked Julian before he kissed her.
"She went up toward the downs," said Lady Verny. "She left no directions behind her. She's a will-o'-the-wisp, my dear."
Julian laughed.
"She knew I'd follow her," he said; "but I'll have my tea first, please."