Having made this resolve, his brow cleared, and he was more satisfied. Tearing up the last half sheet of wasted note-paper he had spoilt in futile attempts to address the lady of the Manor, he laughed at his failures.
"Even if it were etiquette to use the old Roman form of correspondence, which some people think ought to be revived, it wouldn't do in this case," he said. "Imagine it! 'John Walden to Maryllia Vancourt,--Greeting!' How unutterably, how stupendously ridiculous it would look!"
He shut all his writing materials in his desk, and following Nebbie out to the lawn, seated himself with a volume of Owen Meredith in his hand. He was soon absorbed. Yet every now and again his thoughts strayed to the Five Sisters, and with persistent fidelity of detail his mind's eye showed him the grassy knoll so soft to the tread, where the doomed trees stood proudly and gracefully, clad just at this season all in a glorious panoply of young green,--where, as the poet whose tender word melodies he was reading might have said of the surroundings: "For moisture of sweet showers, All the grass is thick with flowers."
"Yes, I shall send Bainton up to the Manor with a civil message," he mused--"and he can--and certainly will--add anything else to it he likes. Of course the lady may be offended,--some women take offence at anything--but I don't much care if she is. My conscience will not reproach me for having warned her of the impending destruction of one of the most picturesque portions of her property. But personally, I shall not write to her, nor will I go to see her. I shall have to pay a formal call, of course, in a week or two,--but I need not go inside the Manor for that. To leave my card, as minister of the parish, will be quite sufficient."
He turned again to the volume in his hand. His eyes fell casually on a verse in the poem of 'Resurrection': "The world is filled with folly and sin; And Love must cling where it can, I say,--For Beauty is easy enough to win, But one isn't loved every day."
He sighed involuntarily. Then to banish an unacknowledged regret, he began to criticise his author.
"If the world and the ambitions of diplomatic service had not stepped in between Lord Lytton and his muse, he would have been a fine poet," he said half aloud;--"A pity he was not born obscurely and in poverty--he would have been wholly great, instead of as now, merely greatly gifted. He missed his true vocation. So many of us do likewise. I often wonder whether I have missed mine?"