She began to drag him away from the bowered homestead, but he planted his feet, and took his hand from her arm.

“Not now, Debbie,” he objected gently, but with that subtle note of mastership that had struck so sharply into Jim’s sensitiveness; “it is mail-day, and the letters will be at the house by this time.”

“What do letters matter to us?”

“That we can’t tell until we see them.”

They went in out of the sunshine to their arm-chairs in the shade.  The English mail had arrived, and it was very interesting.  Letters from lords and ladies, piles of papers of fashionable intelligence, voices from that world which one of the pair had already begun to hanker to be back in, although not yet distinctly conscious of it.  The bride fetched her work-basket, and busied herself with a piece of useless embroidery, while the bridegroom read aloud to her passages from the epistles of his titled correspondents, and from the printed chronicles of their doings here and there.  She had dreamed of his reading again the sort of things that he used to read, while she sewed and listened; but in the life that he had lived and grown to there had been no room for learning and the arts.  He had dropped them, with his health and his horsemanship, long ago.  The coroneted letters and the morning post occupied them until luncheon.

At luncheon, as at every other meal—­despite the new husband’s expressed desire to have his wife to himself—­his valet was present as butler, watching over the dyspeptic’s diet, and seeing that the wine was right.  Neither master nor man trusted anybody else to do this.  It was a large crumple in Deb’s rose-leaf, Manton’s limpet-like attachment to Claud, who seemed unable to do anything without his servant’s help, and the latter’s cool relegation of herself to the second place in the MENAGE.  It was all very well for her to give her husband the premier place—­she did it gladly—­but for Manton to take possession of Redford as a mere appendage of his lord’s was quite another matter.  It was still the honeymoon, and he might do as he liked—­or rather, as Claud liked; but it was not difficult to foresee the day when the valet who dictated to her cook would become too much for the proud spirit of the lady of the house, with whom it had ever been dangerous to make too free—­or to foretell what would happen then.

Claud dozed through the afternoon—­like most idle and luxurious men, he drank a great deal of wine, which made him sleepy—­and Deb took the opportunity to go all through her house and put everything in order.  They met again at tea, and had a stroll about the garden, arm-in-arm and happy.  Dinner was a rather silent function.  Deb wished for Jim, and regretted her easy abandonment of him; Claud never talked when he was eating—­the business was too serious, and Manton was there.  But while her husband smoked over his coffee, serene and charming, she sat alone with him, revelling in his wit and gaiety, telling herself that he was indeed the splendid fellow she had always thought him.