And thus the course of love was not all smooth to our Apollo.  It was still pleasant for him when he was there on the croquet ground, or sitting in Mrs Dale’s drawing-room with all the privileges of an accepted lover.  It was pleasant to him also as he sipped the squire’s claret, knowing that his coffee would soon be handed to him by a sweet girl who would have tripped across the two gardens on purpose to perform for him this service.  There is nothing pleasanter than all this, although a man when so treated does feel himself to look like a calf at the altar, ready for the knife, with blue ribbons round his horns and neck.  Crosbie felt that he was such a calf,—­and the more calf-like, in that he had not as yet dared to ask a question about his wife’s fortune.  “I will have it out of the old fellow this evening,” he said to himself, as he buttoned on his dandy shooting gaiters that morning.

“How nice he looks in them,” Lily said to her sister afterwards, knowing nothing of the thoughts which had troubled her lover’s mind while he was adorning his legs.

“I suppose we shall come back this way,” Crosbie said, as they prepared to move away on their proper business when lunch was over.

“Well, not exactly!” said Bernard.  “We shall make our way round by Darvell’s farm, and so back by Gruddock’s.  Are the girls going to dine up at the Great House to-day?”

The girls declared that they were not going to dine up at the Great House,—­that they did not intend going to the Great House at all that evening.

“Then, as you won’t have to dress, you might as well meet us at Gruddock’s gate, at the back of the farmyard.  We’ll be there exactly at half-past five.”

“That is to say, we’re to be there at half-past five, and you’ll keep us waiting for three-quarters of an hour,” said Lily.  Nevertheless the arrangement as proposed was made, and the two ladies were not at all unwilling to make it.  It is thus that the game is carried on among unsophisticated people who really live in the country.  The farmyard gate at Farmer Gruddock’s has not a fitting sound as a trysting-place in romance, but for people who are in earnest it does as well as any oak in the middle glade of a forest.  Lily Dale was quite in earnest—­and so indeed was Adolphus Crosbie,—­only with him the earnest was beginning to take that shade of brown which most earnest things have to wear in this vale of tears.  With Lily it was as yet all rose-coloured.  And Bernard Dale was also in earnest.  Throughout this morning he had stood very near to Bell on the lawn, and had thought that his cousin did not receive his little whisperings with any aversion.  Why should she?  Lucky girl that she was, thus to have eight hundred a year pinned to her skirt!

“I say, Dale,” Crosbie said, as in the course of their day’s work they had come round upon Gruddock’s ground, and were preparing to finish off his turnips before they reached the farmyard gate.  And now, as Crosbie spoke, they stood leaning on the gate, looking at the turnips while the two dogs squatted on their haunches.  Crosbie had been very silent for the last mile or two, and had been making up his mind for this conversation.  “I say, Dale,—­your uncle has never said a word to me yet as to Lily’s fortune.”