68 CHAPTER III. A LITTLE ABOUT THE PHILOSOPHER. "The adoration of his heart had been to her only HE song that Solomon sang so many THE hundred years ago, is echoed by his sons and daughters to-day-"Vanitas vanitatum !" or, as Val so pithily explained to her lover, "Everything's bosh." Still some human butterflies heed it not, but go fluttering through the ephemeral sunshine, oblivious that shade exists, and of these Val is one. Seven days, long, cloudless, golden days, that have fallen from the golden Summer sky, follow the ride in which Jack laid bare his honest heart, to be prized or spurned, according to a woman's will. Seven days, in which the younger olive branches of the Egerton tree, the blue-eyed, flaxenhaired prototype of Saint Cecilia, and the plucky Augustus Adolphus, otherwise "Gus," find that a marvellous change has come over the spirit of Val's dream. Seven days, in which Jack, though he haunts the place like a substantial, fresh-coloured ghost, fails to exchange a dozen satisfactory sentences with the ruler of his destiny. The real fact of the case is that Val scarcely thinks of him at all; her pretty head is crammed with other things, which, though flimsy in themselves, are yet suggestive of important events in the future. Flounces, furbelows, dresses, rise in billowy masses through her fingers and her brain, and when for a moment they vanish, visions of certain pleasure, delicious excitement, and probable admiration, usurp their place. At last the skin of pearl, the rose-petal bloom, will find a wider circle of admirers than they have seen for the period of seventeen years. Full of herself, her beauty, her probable lovers, it is not to be wondered at that, when Val recollects her lugubrious swain, it is to reflect that he might have the magnanimity to leave her alone, especially since she has pledged herself to become a holocaust on the altar of necessity later on-i.e., that] she purposes marrying him, none more eligible putting in an appearance. But men have no reason," she mutters to herself; "and neither have they any discretion, or Jack would see at once how seriously he is injuring his own cause by such pertinacious dangling after one, and by his vigilant knowledge of one's whereabouts. Women can't love a man who is a bore." So seven days slip by, and Pater-familias, of whom we have heard but little as yet, rouses himself with a supreme effort from the eider-down cushions, amidst which he passes the major part of his life, to announce in his apathetic voice that he purposes starting on the morrow. Pater-familias, up to this date, has evinced not the slightest interest in the proposed expedition, for to a philosophical mind such events are bagatelles, and if Mr. Egerton's is not a philosophical mind, assuredly it is not his fault. Since the failure of his health-now some ten years ago-he has chiefly existed in a recumbent position, and devoted himself entirely to those refreshing waters of literature known as "modern advanced thought." The supervision of the Fernlee acres, numbering about four hundred, three of which are arable, has long been resigned to a bailiff-luckily an honest one-and to Plantagenet Leonidas, who, though young in years, wears an old head on his shoulders. A sensible arrangement this on Egerton père's part, or his patrimony might possibly have long ago passed into the clutches of Abraham Levi, a "party" on a keen look out for investment in land, for it is not likely that a human being with an average modicum of intelligence can grapple conveniently with the problems of the age, and attend at the same time to the condition of crops and stock. Speculative philosophy as a rule does not agree well with practical agriculture, and neither do the most exhaustive researches on the nature, state, and descent of man, throw any especial light upon the abstruse subject of phosphate fertilisers. |