If she had been a happy American tourist travelling in company with impressionable friends, she would have broken into ecstatic little exclamations of admiration every five minutes, but it had been driven home to her that to her present companion, to whom nothing was new, her rapture would merely represent the crudeness which had existed in contentment in a brown-stone house on a noisy thoroughfare, through a life which had been passed tramping up and down numbered streets and avenues.
They approached at last a second village with a green, a grass-grown street and the irregular red-tiled cottages, which to the unaccustomed eye seemed rather to represent studies for sketches than absolute realities.

The bells in the church tower broke forth into a chime and people appeared at the doors of the cottages.

The men touched their foreheads as the carriage passed, and the children made bobbing curtsies.

Sir Nigel condescended to straighten himself a trifle in his seat, and recognised the greetings with the stiff, half-military salute.
The poor girl at his side felt that he put as little feeling as possible into the movement, and that if she herself had been a bowing villager she would almost have preferred to be wholly ignored.

She looked at him questioningly.
"Are they--must _I_ ?" she began.
"Make some civil recognition," answered Sir Nigel, as if he were instructing an ignorant child.