He remembered certain fragments of their talk about the pictures--the
easy mastery, now brusque, now poetic, with which Dalrymple had shown
him the treasures of the gallery, in the manner of one whose learning
was merely the food of fancy, the stuff on which imagination and reverie
grew rich.

Then, suddenly, his own question--"And Lady Rose?"

And Dalrymple's quiet, "Very well. She'd see you, I think, if you want
to come. She has scarcely seen an English person in the last
three years."

And as when a gleam searches out some blurred corner of a landscape,
there returned upon him his visit to the pair in their country home. He
recalled the small eighteenth-century house, the "château" of the
village, built on the French model, with its high _mansarde_ roof; the
shabby stateliness of its architecture matching plaintively with the
field of beet-root that grew up to its very walls; around it the flat,
rich fields, with their thin lines of poplars; the slow, canalized
streams; the unlovely farms and cottages; the mire of the lanes; and,
shrouding all, a hot autumn mist sweeping slowly through the damp
meadows and blotting all cheerfulness from the sun. And in the midst of
this pale landscape, so full of ragged edges to an English eye, the
English couple, with their books, their child, and a pair of
Flemish servants.

It had been evident to him at once that their circumstances were those
of poverty. Lady Rose's small fortune, indeed, had been already mostly
spent on "causes" of many kinds, in many countries. She and Dalrymple
were almost vegetarians, and wine never entered the house save for the