down the south front of the Tudor house a deep riband of flower-bed, all colour, gleamed and glowed in the summer sun. Sweet-peas were there in huge fragrant groups, stately hollyhocks, with flowers looking as if they had been cut out of thin paper by a master hand, played chaperon from the back; carnations were in a swoon of languid fragrance, love-lies-bleeding drooped its velvety spires, and a border of pansies wagged their silly faces as the wind passed over them. Behind, round the windows of the lower story, great clusters of clematis, like large purple sponges, blossomed, miraculously fed through their thin, dry stalks. At some distance off, in Winchester probably, which pricked the blue haze of heat with dim spires, a church bell came muffled and languid, and at the sound Mrs. Massington smiled.
' That is what I like,' she said. ' I like hearing a railway-whistle when I am not going in the train; I like hearing a church bell when I am not going to church; I like seeing somebody looking very hot when I am quite cool; I like hearing somebody sneeze when I haven't got a cold; I like—oh, I like almost everything,' she concluded broadly.
' I wonder if you, I, we shall like America,' said a voice, which apparently came from two shins and a knee in a basket-chair.
' America?' said Sybil. ' Of course you, I, we will. It is absurd to go there unless one means to like it, and it is simply weak not to like it, if one means to. Bertie, sit up!'
' I don't see why,' said Bertie.
' Because I want to talk to you, and I can't talk to a tennis-shoe.'
The tennis-shoe descended, and the chair creaked.
' Well,' said he.
' You and I are going on business,' she said. ' That makes one feel so like a commercial traveller. The worst of it is neither you nor I have got any wares to offer except our-
