The listeners moistened their lips, Ethelberta took breath, and then went on to describe the scene that ensued, ’A dreadful variation on the game of Blindman’s buff,’ being the words by which she characterized it.

Ethelberta’s manner had become so impassioned at this point that the lips of her audience parted, the children clung to their elders, and Christopher could control himself no longer.  He thrust aside the boughs, and broke in upon the group.

‘For Heaven’s sake, Ethelberta,’ he exclaimed with great excitement, ‘where did you meet with such a terrible experience as that?’

The children shrieked, as if they thought that the interruption was in some way the catastrophe of the events in course of narration.  Every one started up; the two young mechanics stared, and one of them inquired, in return, ‘What’s the matter, friend?’

Christopher had not yet made reply when Ethelberta stepped from her pedestal down upon the crackling carpet of deep leaves.

‘Mr. Julian!’ said she, in a serene voice, turning upon him eyes of such a disputable stage of colour, between brown and grey, as would have commended itself to a gallant duellist of the last century as a point on which it was absolutely necessary to take some friend’s life or other.  But the calmness was artificially done, and the astonishment that did not appear in Ethelberta’s tones was expressed by her gaze.  Christopher was not in a mood to draw fine distinctions between recognized and unrecognized organs of speech.  He replied to the eyes.

‘I own that your surprise is natural,’ he said, with an anxious look into her face, as if he wished to get beyond this interpolated scene to something more congenial and understood.  ’But my concern at such a history of yourself since I last saw you is even more natural than your surprise at my manner of breaking in.’

‘That history would justify any conduct in one who hears it—­’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘If it were true,’ added Ethelberta, smiling.  ‘But it is as false as—­’ She could name nothing notoriously false without raising an image of what was disagreeable, and she continued in a better manner:  ’The story I was telling is entirely a fiction, which I am getting up for a particular purpose—­very different from what appears at present.’

‘I am sorry there was such a misunderstanding,’ Christopher stammered, looking upon the ground uncertain and ashamed.  ’Yet I am not, either, for I am very glad you have not undergone such trials, of course.  But the fact is, I—­being in the neighbourhood—­I ventured to call on a matter of business, relating to a poem which I had the pleasure of setting to music at the beginning of the year.’

Ethelberta was only a little less ill at ease than Christopher showed himself to be by this way of talking.

‘Will you walk slowly on?’ she said gently to the two young men, ’and take the children with you; this gentleman wishes to speak to me on business.’