She came riding down a grass path in the thickets below Lady Grove, perched up on a huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnaby and Archie Garvell, her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had been bothering me about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returning by a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them suddenly. Old Carnaby was trespassing on our ground and so he hailed us in a friendly fashion and pulled up to talk to us.
I didn't note Beatrice at all at first. I was interested in Lord Carnaby, that remarkable vestige of his own brilliant youth. I had heard of him but never seen him. For a man of sixty-five who had sinned all the sins, so they said, and laid waste the most magnificent political debut of any man of his generation, he seemed to me to be looking remarkable fit and fresh. He was a lean little man with grey-blue eyes in his brown face, and his cracked voice was the worst thing in his effect.
"Hope you don't mind us coming this way, Ponderevo," he cried; and my uncle, who was sometimes a little too general and generous with titles, answered, "Not at all, my lord, not at all! Glad you make use of it!"
"You're building a great place over the hill," said Carnaby.
"Thought I'd make a show for once," said my uncle. "It looks big because it's spread out for the sun."
"Air and sunlight," said the earl. "You can't have too much of them. But before our time they used to build for shelter and water and the high-road." . . .
Then I discovered that the silent figure behind the earl was Beatrice.
