So when at last, towards the end of the holiday season, the pair met in the flesh at a country house (Lady Chelmer still protests it was a coincidence), Walter Bassett had no apprehension of danger, and his expression of pleasure at the coincidence was unfeigned, for he felt his correspondence would be lightened. In nothing did he feel the want of pence more keenly than in his inability to keep a secretary for his public work. "Money is time," he used to complain; "the millionaire is your only Methuselah."
The house had an old-world garden, and it was here they had their first duologue. Amber had quickly discovered that Walter was interested in the apiaries that lay at the foot of its slope, and so he found her standing in poetic grace among the tall sweet-peas, with their whites and pinks and faint purples, a basket of roses in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.
As he came to her under the quaint trellised arch, "I always feel like a croquet ball going through the hoop," he said.
"But the ball is always driven," she said.
"Oh, I dare say it has the illusion of freewill. Doubtless the pieces in that chess game, which Eastern monarchs are said to play with human figures, come to think they move of themselves. The knight chuckles as he makes his tortuous jump at the queen, and the bishop swoops down on the castle with holy joy."
She came imperceptibly closer to him. "Then you don't think any of us move of ourselves?"
"One or two of us in each generation. They make the puppets dance."
"Yes. A pity he didn't emigrate to your country, like so many Germans."
"Do you think we need him? But he couldn't have been President. You must be born in America."
"You're terrible ambitious, Mr. Bassett."
"Then come and help me pick blackberries," she said, and caught him by his own love of the unexpected. They left the formal garden, and came out into the rabbit-warren, and toiled up and down hillocks in search of ripe bushes, paying, as Walter said, "many pricks to the pint." And when Amber urged him to scramble to the back of tangled bushes, through coils of bristling briars, "You were right," he laughed; "this _is_ terrible ambitious." The best of the blackberries plucked, Amber began a new campaign against mushrooms, and had frequent opportunities to rebuke his clumsiness in crumbling the prizes he uprooted. She knelt at his side to teach him, and once laid her deft fingers instructively upon his.