CHAPTER VI.
'Agnes, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from outside through the dining-room window; 'and tell mamma.' It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself.

An intelligent foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley might have believed that, after all, England, and even Northern England, had a summer.

Early in the season as it was, the sun was already drawing the color out of the hills; the young green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening.
Except the oaks.

They were brilliance itself against the luminous gray-blue sky.

So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light.