"Yes, by Jove!" Teddie rejoined, and relapsed into silence. "Since my rise," he began presently, "I have been in constant difficulties. It is always the way. When you have not a halfpenny, you do nothing and go nowhere."
Hazel nodded. She longed to ask her brother to what extent he had broken through this wise régime, but held her peace.
"I date my difficulties from the day when I gave a champagne lunch to five fellows I know."
"The day of the rise?" his sister asked shrewdly, awed by this peep into dissipated life.
"You have got it," Teddie admitted. "It may have been foolish, but the fellows have stood me treat often enough—or offered to—and my usual answer, that I did not go in for society because I could not afford to do my part, did not always work, you know. I got talked over. Since then," he continued, "I have stood a theatre or two, and—well, the long and short of it is, that Mrs. Walters, our landlady, wants her rent, and is beginning to make a nuisance of herself."
Hazel thought of the ten pounds that she had bestowed on her uncle’s servant; but, troubled as she was for her brother, she could not repent her of the deed.
"You can’t borrow of Hugh or Gerald?" she ventured gently.
"No," Teddie told her. "We have once for all agreed not to borrow from each other, and it is not a bad plan: for though it is dashed hard luck that _I_ am bound down not to borrow of them, I am thankful to think they cannot borrow of me," he added ruefully.
"Yes," Hazel returned, struck with the sense of this, "that certainly is a good thing. Well," she added, "you must let me think it well over. I will do my best, Teddie, to help you."
Already a half-formed plan had arisen in her mind, but she greatly wondered whether she could bring herself to go through with it. Certainly she could not for herself; yet for Teddie it was different—for Teddie she could do much.
Presently they left the roadway, clambered up a high bank, and plunging through a tangle of brambles, entered the cool, leafy walks of their own grounds—a delicious relief after the dust and glare. The foliage was just now at its full, and for the most part of a dark green, each leaf heavy, thick, and strong, with as yet no hint of autumn in its perfection of maturity. Elm, lime, beech, horse-chestnut, oak, copper beech, silver birch, feathery larch, ash, fir, and pine; what an enthralling medley of delight! The great tree branches, heavy to repletion, waved stately in the gentle summer wind, dignified, majestic, all the sportiveness of youth and spring-time gone; rugged-barked, smooth-barked, light grey; green trunks, whitey-grey trunks, almost black trunks; gnarled, veined, moss-grown, creeper-covered; the unspeakable grace of the smaller boughs growing from out the larger limbs: each shapely twig, after a series of knots and delicate articulations, terminating in a leaf of perfect outline, each indentation clearly defined, the edges of some almost fluted in the vigour of their full, crisp growth.