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Now, as she passed out under the archway on to the square lawn of the troco-ground, bare-headed, in her pale dress, a sweet seriousness filling all her mind, even as the sweet summer twilight filled all the valley and veiled the gleaming surface of the Long Water far below, she felt wholly in sympathy with the aspect and sentiment of the place.
She moved forward and sat on the broad stone balustrade which, topping the buttressed masonry that supports it above the long downward grass slope of the park, encloses the troco-ground on the south. The landscape lay drowned in the mystery of the summer night.
To compass the doing of all things, not only decently and in order, but handsomely, and with a becoming dignity, this required time and thought. And so, it was not until after dinner that Katherine found herself at leisure to cease taking thought for the morrow. Too tired to rest herself by reading, she wandered out on the troco-ground followed by Camp.
Lady Calmady's long-sustained calm had given way, and she wept. "We buried him, in his blanket, under the big Portugal-laurel, where the nightingale sings, at the corner of the troco-ground, close to Camp the First and Old Camp. The upper servants came, and Chaplin and Hariburt from the house-stables, and Chifney and the head-lad and some of the gardeners.
He came towards her that first Richard Calmady, her husband and lover across the smooth, green levels of the troco-ground which lay dusky in the mingling half-lights of the nearly departed sunset and the rising moon, as he had come to her a hundred times in life, back from the farms or the moorlands, from sport or from business, or from those early morning rides, the clean freshness of the morning upon him, after seeing his race-horses galloped.
Come back with me, gentle reader, through the iron gates under the crumbling archways of the pleasaunce, where the Virginia creeper twines its delicate wreaths and glorifies the old stones in autumn with a flush of flame. The troco-ground, with its green turf as smooth as a billiard-table, is just as it was in the days of King James.
A strangely belated nightingale still sang in the big, Portugal laurel beside the quaint, pepper-pot summer-house in the far corner of the troco-ground, where the twenty-foot brick wall dips, in steps of well-set masonry, to the gray three-foot balustrade. She never remembered to have heard one sing so late in the summer.
I thought I would venture on an early attempt to find you. But I drew the house blank, though assisted by Winter the terrace also blank. Then from the troco-ground I beheld that which looked promising, coquetting with Dickie's yearlings. So I followed on to know my father and the maids again followed on to to my reward." Mr. Quayle stood directly in front of her.
Two servants came out, hurriedly, from that same arched side-door. Then Clara, that devoted handmaiden, called from the window of the red drawing-room. "Her ladyship's there, on the troco-ground. Don't you see, Mr. Winter?" The butler hurried along the terrace. Katherine met him on the steps of the garden-hall.
And his mother noted, not without a sinking of the heart, that the window-seat, which in his solitary moods Dickie most frequented, was precisely that one of the eastern bay which commanded beyond the smooth, green expanse and red walls of the troco-ground a good view of the grass ride, running parallel with the lime avenue, along which the horses from the racing stables were taken out and back, morning and evening, to the galloping ground.
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