"You will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had said
carpingly, "but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost
as much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand what
holds him to Town, but Yessney--" and the dowager had shrugged her
shoulders.
There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney that was
certainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia,
notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much more
sylvan than "leafy Kensington." She looked on the country as
something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to
become, troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of
town-life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage with
Mortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading
of what she called "the Jermyn-street-look" in his eyes as the
woods and heather of Yessney had closed in on them yesternight.
Her will-power and strategy had prevailed; Mortimer would stay.
Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf,
which the indulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of
neglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken
dropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew.
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