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Rh sagaciously made note of the direction in which the girl was working her way along this hedge, and he chose his position so that her activities, as time went on, would not take her farther away from him. Yet he opened up his thumb box and fell to work without further addressing her, only too conscious of the uninterrupted clicking of the shears behind him. If he sniffed an aroma of the idyllic in that situation he betrayed no signs of it. She had not, at any rate, taken to her heels; and he could afford to leave the outcome on the lap of time.

He turned, with a less impersonal eye, and studied the house. He was impressed by the pathos of its faded grandeur. It might at one time, built as it was in imitation of an English manor, have been a pretentious enough pile. But everything about it had long since fallen into decay. The neglected cornices drooped without paint. The mortar had fallen away from between the bricks. The dilapidated verandas, half covered with masses of Virginia creeper, showed a roof sadly broken and a